How to: Photo judging site

-rr- · 2010-04-25 18:16:26

I’ve looked at all kinds of plugins but can’t figure out how to go about creating a site for judging user uploaded photos.

I need to set up a site where:

1. Applicants can upload images and include all their contact info through a form. They are not see what other applicants have uploaded.

2. Uploaded photos are to be viewed by five judges who are all assembled in one location to go through all the images together. Only one judge needs to manipulate the gallery while others view the images on separate computers. The goal is to choose 300 images to be published in a book.

3. Judges only need to categorize the images into three groups: in, out, possible1, possible2. Only one judge needs to do this while others view and comment on the images.

4. They need to be able to sort through image groups and recategorize single images when necessary. There needs to be some kind of an image counter to help the work.

5. Everything needs to be done in the front end as simply as possible since none of these judges are computer savvy.

6. A list of winning photos and their contact info needs to be generated when judging is over.

I’ve tried mem_moderation to make a form to upload the images, but no success in getting applicants personal data in (name, address, email, etc.).

Also I don’t know what plugin to use to make recategorizing possible from the front end.

I’ve already checked out practically all the open source photo gallery software available and none of them can do this or they are way too complicated/cluttered for the purpose.

Can anyone advise how to go about this with Textpattern?

jakob · 2010-04-25 21:14:39

To be quite honest, if your five judges are all assembled in one location and are not internet savvy, I would save the effort of constructing a complex web-based system and just concentrate on implementing a means for contestants to submit their images and a means for outputting the shortlist. You wouldn’t necessarily need to use textpattern for this, an upload form system would suffice: e.g. email-form or mach form or similar.

If judging is going to be done with all judges present in one place via computer or beamer, then perhaps simply invest in lightroom or aperture, both of which give you much better sorting, filtering, compare and image assessment control, speed and zoom for the actual judging (including zoom glass for pixel-level quality, which is a factor for book publishing). Although these programs are not free, they are almost definitely cheaper than the development time to set up an equivalent system with txp. Once you have your selection categorised how you want, you can generate output from that in the form of lists with metadata as well as html web albums with downsized images for publishing online. If your competition is of a sufficiently high profile, you might even get apple or adobe to sponsor it, or a local computer supplier to provide the equipment with installed programs for the duration of the judging.

If this system seems workable for you, you may find it most productive to concentrate your efforts on an upload form, or adapting one of the above upload forms, that also saves the submitted owner data as metadata directly attached to the respective image.
If you wish to publish the results online but don’t find the html gallery export from lightroom or aperture sufficient and wish to use txp for this, there are various export plugins for lightroom and aperture which export to a mysql database. These you could adapt to export a ready-made txp_image table from the image metadata stored with the image. While I’ve not done this before with mysql, I have adapted a lightroom “export to flat-file” script for use with photostack.

-rr- · 2010-04-26 08:02:33

Thanks for the comment jakob, but I do think it is easier to combine all the functions in a website instead of investing in computers that can run Lightroom or Aperture AND teaching the judges how to use them. The textpattern plugins ALMOST do what’s needed.

It’s about bringing in certain high profile persons into the selection process. The whole thing needs to be automated, since nobody would know how to use either Lightroom nor Aperture. As I said, they are not computer savvy, but the DO know how to view web pages. The images will be sent to a repro house who will manage the whole publishing question and the judges will not be (and don’t want to be) involved in that part in any way.

The whole setup is much simpler than it seems, the most important functions being:

Upload images with custom fields.

View images in a gallery with ability to change their categories.

Filter gallery view by category.

Export a list of given category’s images and custom field data.

jakob · 2010-04-26 08:57:43

Upload images with custom fields

For submitting user data mem_moderation, as you mentioned, would be one way to go, possibly one of the other mem_… plugins. I’m not sure why you have no success with custom fields but that certainly is possible. The key to this approach is that you make each submission an article and attach the image as an article image (e.g. think of it as an article with an attached image, not an image with additional custom fields). See this post for a sample and a few posts further up for a general overview of the application areas of the different mem_…plugins. What I’ve not tried with mem_moderation is to upload images with mem_moderation_image but I know that my txpbuilders colleague jonathan (jstubbs) has.

View images in a gallery with ability to change their categories

Viewing images is no problem (just straightforward txp:article / txp:article_custom with a basic form that shows the article_image) but I know of no plugin to change their category allocation from the front end. Essentially you need to change the database from the front end. I think you would need to write this plugin yourself, or commission it.

I recently had an analagous situation for a conference planner where the sessions can be arranged via drag and drop. This case also involves updating certain fields (the timestamps) of multiple articles from a front-end page. Another of my txpbuilders colleagues, Stef/Bloke, wrote the necessary functions for this.

Filter gallery view by category

If each image is an article as described above, you can use the standard txp:article tag, which is context-sensitive (= shows only articles from the currently selected section or category) or txp:article_custom tag with the category attribute (in both cases we are talking about article categories, not image categories).

Export a list of given category’s images and custom field data.

This, again, is just a matter of using txp:article/article_custom to output the articles from the relevant winning category(ies) with the relevant form and custom fields.

* * *

Two general points:

txp’s built-in image handling allows for only two sizes of an image: a thumbnail and a large image. This may not be enough for your purposes, particularly if contestants are asked to submit high-resolution images suitable for printing, which are generally way too large for the screen. You may find yourself needing a high-res, a screen-res and a gallery thumbnail view. There are ways of sort-of achieving this:
- one is to use an image-resizer script to create an intermediate size. The problem with this option is that the server sometimes chokes on the memory required to downsize very large images.
- another approach is store the high-res image as a file (e.g. under files not under images) with a similar kind of filename/id to the image so you can link them. This typically involves an additional manual step to make the screen-sized downsized images.
  This issue may not arise if you only ask the winners for the hi-res image after judging.
for the actual judging you may want to set up your website on a local installation with a LAN for the other machines to improve the speed of image loading.

Last edited by jakob (2010-04-26 09:12:23)

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#1 2010-04-25 18:16:26

How to: Photo judging site

#2 2010-04-25 21:14:39

Re: How to: Photo judging site

#3 2010-04-26 08:02:33

Re: How to: Photo judging site

#4 2010-04-26 08:57:43

Re: How to: Photo judging site

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