Coronavirus

PhotoEntry will continue to be fully supported during the Coronavirus crisis. At the moment there are a lot of demands on my time, but I will try to give you some ideas that may be useful during the difficult period. I will also outline some enhancements that I will get done as soon as time allows.

Version 35.1 of PhotoEntry has now been released. This provides Viewings that replace Judge Previews, allowing scores and notes from multiple judges and all of your users (configurable). Voting will also be added in a subsequent release.

Last updated: 15 August 2020

Enhancements Released

These enhancements have been released to help with running Competitions remotely:

• Viewing notes maximum length has been increased from 250 to 600 characters.
• Viewings now have settings for Scores and Notes. Various options are available, and can be set separately for external Judges and your own Users.
• The grey border around Judge Preview images is now selectable from 4 colours. This allows you to choose the best background for the current image.
• The Viewing screen now has a Toggle Full Screen option at the top. This switchces the browser to full-screen mode and is highly recommended. Note that this is independent from zooming (see below).
• Clicking on a Viewing image will now zoom the image. Zoomed Images will fit within the browser window, maintaining the aspect ratio. An Image will only ever be down-scaled; if the browser window is larger than the Image it will show with the selected background colour. Clicking anywhere on a zoomed Image screen reverts to the normal screen. You can also use the left/right arrow keys while zoomed.
• Viewings have an additional option to display the User's name.
• Scores entered by a chosen Viewer can be imported into the Competition. This is particularly useful when external Judges have scored your Competition. After you have reviewed their results you can import.

Other Considerations and Tips

Videoconferenced Judging

Some clubs are sending the Judge Preview to the judge, and then having the actual judging take place using, for example, Zoom videoconferencing. The judge brings up the Preview, shares his/her screen, and talks through the judging similar to normal. The Competition Secretary enters the scores into PhotoEntry as they are announced (and the judge could also enter them into the notes field). And of course the normal Entry Report emails can be generated at the end.

This seems to have been very successful. You would need to decide how to handle held-back images - a number of ways are possible.

Please let me know if you have success or otherwise doing this, and the videoconferencing software that you used. I'll share those here.

Information received from clubs (not tested by PhotoEntry):

• A variation of this has been tested but not yet used for a real competition. The judge gets the preview in advance. The Competition Secretary runs Di Centra or FFP as normal but over a videoconference on Teams with the judge providing commentary. The judge still has the high resolution images to look at to counter video degradation on the videoconference.
• We are using GoTo Meeting web conferencing. Members add their images to PE in the usual way and we run DiCentra by sharing a host screen. To all intents and purposes it works like a normal Meeting, except Members log on via GoTo Meeting to view images (DPI only of course). Logmein, who own the software are offering a 3 month free Covid-10 Emergency Workers Kit to any organisation that is non-profit, and/or has charitable status (e qualify as part of a larger Village Club). It's worth a look. Its only about £13 a month in any case, billable monthly, if particular clubs do not qualify.

Public Judging

Some clubs are interested in having members vote for or give scores for entries, rather than having a dedicated judge. If you are interested in this please have a think about how you would want it to work and get in touch.

I'm collating responses at the moment and when I get a chance I will see if there is any commonality between what various clubs have suggested. Please keep the suggestions coming in, and forgive me if I don't respond individually.

Publishing Judge Preview Links (updated following enhancements)

The Judge Preview feature is designed to give acecss to one judge per preview. The judge gets to see anonymous correct resolution (potentially after resizing) images, stripped of identifying metadata. He/she can also makes notes.

You can subsequently send the preview link to your club members so they can view the images and comments themselves, BUT before doing so please ensure you can accept the following caveats:

• The preview contains full-sized images, not thumbnails. There is no way to stop those images being copied merely by saving them from a browser.
• Your members could forward the preview links, allowing others access.
• Ensure you set the Preview Notes status to Readonly before sending out to members. Or if you forget, do it immediately (no need to reissue the Preview).
• The preview has an expiry date (set when you create it), and will automatically be deleted after that date.
• There is a new option to display the User's name along with the title.

As mentioned above, we are looking at an enhancement that could include judge notes in the Entry Reports that are emailed. These would never contain full sized images however, only thumbnails if you enable them.

Sharing Access to Entries for External Competition Selection, etc

This is useful in normal circumstances, although especially so at the moment. If you wish some members of your club to view complete sets of images, but you don't need them to have full administrative access, try the following:

1. Create a "dummy" Competition to hold the Entries you wish them to view. It's probably best (but not essential) to keep it within the same Competition Group. Set the Competition to be inactive, and its state to Open. It will not be visible to anyone without administrative rights to that Competition.
2. On the Actions tab, click Import Entries From Other Competitions. You will now be able to select the Competitions that you want Entries to be imported from, optionally filtering by score. Importing is a fast operation as it doesn't make further copies of the Image files themselves.
3. If uou have warnings about Users having a certain number of Entries in a Class, it is because the import resulted in more Entries than would be normally allowed. Either ignore them, or on the Number tab set the Max Entries values appropriately and the warnings will disappear.
4. On the General tab near the bottom, select who you would like to delegate access to and an optional expiry date. You may select up to 2 non-administrators.
5. When those people go into the Competition Group, they will see that Competition with a running-man icon beside indicating they are able to "run" the Competition. That will allow them to do limited administration, without changing the underlying parameters. They can even delete Entries if they wish to trim down the list.
6. Two people could share such a Competition, or you could create separate ones for different people.
7. At any stage you can safely delete the dummy Competition without affecting the original Entries.