STONYBROOK CAMERA CLUB - DIGITAL COMPETITION GUIDELINES

We will now collect all digital competition images via email instead of you having to bring them in on the night of the competition.  This process will help with the following:

Please always email your images to images@stonybrookcc.com(by the deadline that will be sent via an announcement and will be posted on the competition calendar.
Your submissions will be acknowledged – if you do not get an acknowledgement in 24 hours please email images@stonybrookcc.com

We will be using an Image Competition Manager for the competition. However, in order to be successful in the use of the competition software it is essential that we use a good file naming convention.  It is also important that you apply your name to your files in a consistent manner.  As an example if you use the name John Doe then always use John Doe.  Do not change it to J Doe for competition and then to John D – this is a key component to the scoring for your final totals.  If this is not consistent then we may have to use a numerical ID in the future.

File Naming
The files must be named as follows:
XYYY#title~maker!SBCC.file type  to simplify it further XYYY#title~maker!SBCC.jpg

Files names will contain several pieces of information.

#
The number sign (#) above represents the  delimiter used to indicate the image title fields in the file name.

~
The tilde character (~) above represents the  delimiter used to separate fields in the file name.

X
Competition type code. Typical values for this character would be "P" for Pictorial/General, "N" for Nature, and "C" for Creative.

YYY
The competition class code “A” or “B” and can be one or more characters followed by a delimiter.

title
The title to be used for the image, terminated by a delimiter.  Please capitalize the title see good and bad examples:

Good: Red Fox Hunting
Bad: red Fox hunting
Good: Brown Barn
Bad: brownbarn (lower case and no space)

maker
The first and last name of the maker of the image followed by an exclamation point (!) and then SBCC.  eg.  John Doe!SBCC

filetype
The file type extension of the image file. Supported file types are: jpg and tif .  jpg extension signifying a JPEG image is the recommended format. Note: The file type is always preceded by a period.

Any underscore characters (_) appearing in a file name will be automatically replaced with blanks.

Examples:

PA#Sunrise over Mono Lake~John Doe!SBCC.jpg
"P" is the Competition Type identifier, Pictorial/General in this case.
"A" is the Competition Level followed by a #(number sign).
"Sunrise over Mono Lake" is the title followed by a ~ (tilde) delimiter
"John Doe" is the maker's name followed by “!” (an exclamation)
".jpg" indicates this is a JPEG format file.

CA#Dancing Eyes~John Doe!SBCC.jpg
"C" is the Competition Type identifier, Creative in this. case
"A" is the Competition Level followed by a #(number sign).  Please note: there is only one class in creative and for file naming purposes this will be “A”.  In the future we may have more than one class and file naming instructions will be modifies accordingly.
"Dancing Eyes" is the title followed by a ~ (tilde) delimiter
"John Doe" is the maker's name followed by “!” (an exclamation)
".jpg" indicates this is a JPEG format file.

NA#Red Fox Hunting~John Doe!SBCC.jpg
"N" is the Competition Type identifier, Nature in this. case
"A" is the Competition Level followed by a #(number sign).
"Red Fox Hunting" is the title followed by a ~ (tilde) delimiter
"John Doe" is the maker's name followed by “!” (an exclamation)
".jpg" indicates this is a JPEG format file.

Makeup file names: Name the files as described above but add the work MAKEUP in upper case letters to the Title (leave a space between the title and the word MAKEUP as shown below.

PA#Sunrise over Mono Lake MAKEUP~John Doe!SBCC.jpg

File Name Limitations
Different operating systems have different limitations for the length and contents of file names. Image Competition Manager runs on Windows, so file names must always conform to these operating system limitations.

Windows
File names cannot include any of the characters: "\ / : * ? " ‘ , 9( ) = ` # ^ < >. File names cannot start or end with a blank.

Macintosh
The characters allowed in a file name on a Macintosh system are different than for Windows. You must be careful to use the Windows file name standards or you will be unable to read the files on a Windows system. Be especially careful of file names starting or ending with blanks since these are very hard to detect.
File name lengths seem to be limited to 64 or fewer characters. When Macintosh images are e-mailed, the file names are often truncated to even shorter lengths

Additional Guidelines:  Most of these are as per the digital competition rules available on the SBCC web site.

Note: 
Spaces are permitted in the Title field and in the Maker’s name field.  

DO NOT USE A PERIOD,   “.”,   in the file name or your name