Author Archives: Jason

Last week’s challenge was a huge success with nearly 2,000 images submitted. Thanks to everyone who participated. This week we’re going even more obscure to really let you get those creative juices flowing with “Road Signs” – Pure, color photography avec road sign.

Submit your Entries Now

How to enter:

1. Upload a new photo to Pixoto
2. Put it in the Fine Art Category (any subcategory)
3. Tag the image with PWCroadsigns

Prizes you can win:

• #1 image will be featured in the Pixoto.com sidebar and be viewed over 100,000 times
• 1st-3rd place win a free 1 year Pixoto Pro subscription (a $71 value)*
• Top 10 winners will get Award Badges, 1000 Points plus 1,000 credits for future image submission
• A blog post will highlight the winners

Rules you should follow:

• Photos must include a road sign shot so the face is legible
• Keep it natural! NO HDR or Excessive Image Enhancement. If the image looks fake in any way – we’ll disqualify it
• Photos must be in full color
• Qualified Images will be chosen based on ImageScore
• Images must be submitted/resubmitted during the week
• Images must be tagged PWCroadsigns
• You may resubmit an image already on Pixoto, but please be aware that ImageScore, awards and points for the image will be reset upon resubmission
• Duplicates of previously uploaded, and not deleted, submissions will be removed
• Entries that do not comply with the above rules will be disqualified

*Limit one membership per winner.

Submit your Entries Now

Are you not satisfied with the number of votes your images are getting on Pixoto?  Now you can do something about it: just press the DuelBoost button next to any image, pay 10 credits, and your image is guaranteed to get 5 additional duels in the next 24 hours.

Details:

• Images that currently are “unpaused” or “Boosted” may not be boosted
• You can boost anybody’s image – not just your own
• Boost images as many times as you like
• Votes will come in randomly over 12-24 hours in order to prevent cheating

Some background

By far the most common question we get from avid Pixoto users is “Why isn’t my image getting more votes”.  The answer is usually “because your Image has stabilized and, based on its ImageScore, will now only get duels periodically.”  This is because our algorithms allocate the most votes to images that are doing the best – this fact is the reason Pixoto works at all.  One thing we didn’t really grok until recently was that while in aggregate the system might be getting the best results possible – individual members were feeling slighted.  Essentially they wanted more votes for their images and there wasn’t anything they could do about it.  On Pixoto, a higher number of votes doesn’t mean a higher ImageScore – it just increases the confidence in the score the image has so adding more votes to images actually helps the system overall.  By pricing DuelBoost at 10 credits for 5 votes we’ve assured 15 additional images get at least one more vote than they would have thereby improving the accuracy of the system even more.

Happy Boosting!

The following is  a tentative schedule of when weekly and “Best of the Year” awards will be run for the balance of January.  We will announce the “Best Photographer” awards in conjunction with the “Best Images”.

We’re so excited!  We just handed our first Daily Image Awards.  We’ve been wanting to provide daily awards since we launched Pixoto but have been waiting until we had enough submissions each day (I mean who cares if you are the top image submitted today – if there are only 4 other images in the category).  But now – with between 2,000 and 3,000 photos being entered in our contests every day – the daily awards really mean something.

Daily Awards will be given only to the Top 10 images submitted in categories with 50 or more images entered that day.  We’ll hand them out every morning (PST) for the previous day’s entries.

Happy Shooting!

Are you one of the Top 20 Photographers in the World for 2011?

Make sure you have at least 10 highly ranked images in a category to find out.

We will announce the Top 20 Photographers of 2011 Awards in mid-January 2012 for each Pixoto category with more than 750 participants.  Here are the details:

• The winners of the awards will be based on the average ImageScore of your best 10 images submitted in the category during 2011.
• You must have submitted 10 images to a category to qualify.  We want to make sure the Top Photographers have consistently great images – not just a few lucky shots.
• Winners will receive a special badge prominently placed on their profile page and an embeddable widget for their personal websites.
• We will publicize through a press-release, direct email, social media, a banner in the sidebar and through a dedicated section of the site accessible from the header.
• We are not using Pixoto Points for this purpose because they tend to favor early adopters and we want everybody to be on a level playing field.
• Submission Deadline:  New Year’s Eve, 2011 (based on GMT)
• (categories that currently don’t meet the 750 participant minimum are: Sports, Mobile, Fashion, and Nudes & Boudoir)

 

Just a quick note to let our members know that all images submitted in 2011 will be eligible for Best of the Year awards which will be handed out in mid-January.  Points will be given for these awards based on the number of images submitted in that category for the entire year.  A special best of the year award badge is being designed for the occasion.  We will add the ability to filter the player leaderboard by time period in January.

Happy Shooting!

We’ve been burning the midnight oil here at Pixoto just released our first major overhaul to the ImageDuel voting system since our Beta launch.  We’ve been listening closely to your feedback and analyzing the data and we think this new version of ImageDuel is a very significant improvement.  Here’s a sampling of what’s new:

• It’s much faster (actually – the whole site is faster)
• Inaccurate pausing of great images should be vastly reduced
• Images with higher ImageScores will get more votes than other images
• Images now compete only against other images of similar quality (essentially they are in on a ladder system and compete with other images in their “rung”)
• Established images will not be dragged down by duels with new images
• New images now compete mostly with new images
• Improved cheating prevention techniques

We also added EXIF data (e.g. camera, f-stop, aperture, etc) to the image detail page. This is available for all images that have EXIF attached to the file.

Please let us know what you think!

We’ve had a lot of feedback lately that there are too many repeat images on the site and that miscategorization is becoming a problem (especially for compiled images).  Based on this feedback we’ve decided to clarify our rules and add a few new ones.  The most important are:

1) Thou shalt not upload an image more than once (without deleting the first one)

2) Thou shall place all compiled images (HDR excluded) in “Photoshop Art” or risk image deletion.

We hope this helps to make Pixoto an even more fun place to come and be inspired.

All the rules can be found in the sidebar of our contest page.

Carlos Castro suggested that it would be helpful to see what ImageScore was required in order to get an award (instead of having to do the math).  Thanks for asking Carlos.  The simple answer to this questions is:

To be included in the Top 5% it takes an ImageScore of about 640 and the Top 10% and 20% come it at around 615 and 580 respectively.

This changes from week to week and category to category but should give you a sense of where your images are trending.

Here is full analysis by category: