Running a photo contest is an excellent way to engage your audience, increase brand awareness, and generate user-generated content. Whether you’re looking to showcase creativity, promote a product, or encourage community participation, photo contests offer an interactive and visually compelling experience.
With Woorise, you can easily set up and manage a photo contest, allowing users to submit their best images while you choose the winner—or let the public decide through voting. In this guide, we will explore two of the most popular types of photo contests you can run using Woorise: one where you manually select the best photo and another where public voting determines the winner.
Accept photo submissions and manually select the best photo
This type of contest gives you complete control over the selection process, ensuring that the winning entry aligns with your brand’s vision or contest criteria. Participants submit their photos through a Woorise form, and you or a panel of judges review the submissions to pick the best one.
This method is ideal for contests that emphasize quality, creativity, and adherence to specific themes rather than popularity. You can set guidelines, such as requiring high-resolution images, a short description, or a specific subject matter. Once the submission period ends, the winning photo can be announced via email, social media, or directly on your contest page.
This photo contest type is best for professional photography contests, branded campaigns, and contests requiring expert evaluation.
- The key to this type of photo contest is to create a Woorise form with a File Upload field, allowing participants to easily submit their photos. You can build your contest from scratch or jumpstart the process by using the Media Upload Contest Template, which comes pre-configured with essential fields and settings.
- In the Form tab you can customize the File Upload field to accept specific file types, set size limits, and define the number of uploaded files per user if the Multi-File upload option is enabled.
- You can further customize your form by adding more fields like a Name and an Email field, setting up confirmation messages or optionally configure email notifications to notify participants and administrators about new entries.
- In the Create tab you can design and style your landing page using blocks. When you are ready click on the Publish button and navigate to the Share tab to start sharing your campaign.
- In the Entries tab, you can view, manage, and export submissions. Once the campaign ends, you can manually select a winner or use the Pick Winners tool from the Actions > Pick Winners to randomly choose winners based on your set criteria.
Accept photo submissions and allow public voting
A photo voting contest is an excellent way to boost engagement and virality. Participants upload their photos, and their friends, family, or followers can vote for their favorite entry. The image with the most votes wins.
Woorise makes it easy to set up voting rules, such as one vote per person per day or requiring users to sign up before voting. This format encourages participants to share their entries widely, increasing brand exposure and social media reach. To prevent fraudulent voting, you can enable CAPTCHA, email verification, or set IP restrictions.
This photo contest type is best for social media engagement, brand awareness, community-driven contests, and influencer collaborations.
- This contest type requires creating two separate campaigns, one to accept photo submissions and another for voting. While you can combine both in a single campaign, using two makes management easier and keeps submissions and voting separate. There is also the option to manually import photos for voting if they have previously collected with other ways.
- Set up a new page with a File Upload field to collect photo entries. You can add additional fields like Name or Description and display this data in your photo gallery later. Optionally you can include a Gallery block to display submissions without enabling voting.
- Once submissions close, create a separate campaign for voting. Add a Gallery block, select the previous submission campaign as the source, and enable Voting to allow participants to vote on their favorite entries.
- Customize the Gallery block settings to set voting rules, entry display, and sorting options. Once configured, publish the campaign and start accepting votes.
For more details on using the Gallery block, including advanced settings for manual entry approval, voting restrictions, custom display options, and sorting preferences, refer to our in-depth guide on how to use the Gallery block.