Photocrowd

One of our members, Paul Burrows, has been spending some time during lockdown entering competitions on the website www.photocrowd.com.

Photocrowd has a number of different membership levels including one that is free to join. By signing up to the free to join option you are entitled to enter one image into any single competitions and up to a maximum number of open competitions at any one time.

There a variety of different subjects and you can choose which you want to enter and which ones you don’t. Some competitions are only open to certain people, for example there are competitions for those using Nikon or Canon cameras where the images must have been taken with that specific camera. There are also competitions for subscribers to various magazines.

Once a competition closes then there are two ways the winners can be determined. The majority are voted on by everyone (the “Crowd”) who has entered the particular contest, hence the name Photocrowd, and there are four voting options, Skip, Ok, Good and Amazing. Images are then ranked on the votes received. Until you have voted on at least 30 images you cannot see where your image is ranked.

The second way winners can be determined is by judges, which is normal on the competitions run by magazines but also some of the “Community” have judges as well.

Most of the competitions are just for fun, although some that are set up by Photocrowd itself offer free membership to their paid for levels to the winners, but there are others that have prizes, such as the magazine sponsored competitions.

To get people started, in the first month there are beginners competitions, usually “Landscapes”, “People” and “Animals” which only allow 100 images and once filled a new one opens.

Paul has had fun entering a number of competitions after discovering the website through a magazine run competition in the first instance. He has now entered over 30 different contests and has been ranked In the top 10% seven times, had an image commended by a judge and his greatest success so far was with the attached image in the contest “Sunset in the City”, which was ranked by the crowd second out of 1134 entries – Well done Paul.