Online photo contest help help help

October 22, 2018 8:36 AM

I need an online service that will enable me to run a photo contest that is NOT tied to a particular social media and does not require an account. Private, global but a few hundred less than 1000 participants.

Here is what I need to be able to do:
-People can upload a photo with name and caption.
-Photo goes to a gallery viewable by anyone with the link.
-People can vote on best/favorite photo(s) via likes, upvotes, private vote, I don't care exactly how just as long as I can see the results.

(This is for a Halloween costume contest for work, if you're curious.)

I need to NOT:
-Require anyone to use a particular social media service.
-Require people to go through an arduous registration process.

I've been looking and it appears that Woobox can do this. I don't necessarily need the service to be free (free trial Woobox is capped at 100 submissions), but I also really don't need the other features Woobox has and $40 a month is kind of high for just needing one internal photo contest.

Our company has a Hootsuite account but the only person who has the login for that is out on vacation and I won't have access until later this week. Does anyone have experience and know if Hootsuite will do this? I can't tell from this page if we would have access to it (I suspect we have the lowest-feature paid account).

Also open to kludgy options but would prefer an all-in-one.

(Not able to use google suite to do any of this due to internal tech lockdowns.)

Thank you!

posted by phunniemee to Technology (4 answers total)

Do you guys have a Sharepoint or anything similar setup? That's how we run our Halloween costume contests with a mix of remote and local employees. I believe the people running it use a gallery with voting. We're a smaller group, so I think it's mostly in person photos and email submissions uploaded by one person, but you should be able to make the upload "public" (as in, public to your employees, not public to the world) to handle your greater numbers.

A kludgy way would be to use an internal shared folder and have everyone dump their photos in there, and then find a free polling service. I imagine that'd be easier to find than an all-in-one service. I'd try to find one with a write in option so you can essentially crowd-source the data entry part.
posted by natabat at 9:22 AM on October 22, 2018

Response by poster: Do you guys have a Sharepoint or anything similar setup?

One of the biggest problems right now is that we don't have one centralized thing the whole group is able to access right now, so I have to go third party. Half of the group has sharepoint access, the other half does not. Half the group has google access, the other half does not. And so on down the line for just about everything.
posted by phunniemee at 9:26 AM on October 22, 2018

Ug, that sounds painful. Another option could just be to share the login for a throwaway hosting account that allows public voting. Maybe imgur?

Good luck!
posted by natabat at 10:04 AM on October 22, 2018

Best answer: Never mind I got approval to get a Woobox account. Yay!
posted by phunniemee at 11:43 AM on October 22, 2018