Upgrading from Image Competition Manager v1

The Image Competition Manager program has been upgraded in a major way, allowing it to integrate with a website for submitting and displaying competitions.

Each club has their own website associated with the new version of the ICM program. You will be able to manage this website and your competitions by assigning roles to club members. All of the website management is done through your Photo Club Services website.

Since much of the website content is reserved for members it is necessary for members to Login to your website to use the non-public features. The login will also set the user’s permissions and roles. Images submitted through the website will be associated with the user who submitted the image.

The website we are providing should have sufficient features to serve as your club website, but that is not a requirement. One of our significant costs is related to hosting these websites and storing the images from the clubs. We will gradually add more capability and style to these websites, and allow more customization by each club.

Preparing Your Website

We recommend you follow the steps below to setup your new website. Do not create more than one website. If you have difficulty, please contact support at Support@PhotoClubServices.com.

1. Go to http://1.photoclubservices.com/ClubSetup.aspx to create your new website. You can us an existing user account if you are managing multiple clubs.
2. A Login Name and password will be e-mailed to you if you did not specify an existing account. You are currently the only user on the website and you have the role of Administrator. This role allows you to change everything on the website. Other users will be more restricted.
3. Use the menu “Administration, Manage Club Profile”. Make a note of your Club Id since you will need it to setup the Image Competition Manager program. You can set the basic information about your club on the “General” tab. Use the “Edit” button to begin making changes and remember to use the “Update” button to save your changes before changing tabs.
4. Use the “Addresses” tab. Click the “New Address” button to add a contact address and meeting location address for your club.
5. Addresses are used by “Locations”. A Location defines much more information than an address, but you must define the address first. Use the “Administration, Manage Locations” menu item to create a Location for your meetings. You might also use Locations for special event locations. You may now specify your meeting location on the “General” tab back on the “Manage Club Profile” menu item.
6. If your club is known by multiple names, you might use the “Alias” tab to provide those alternate names. These alias names might help the public find your website. You do not need to specify your “short club name” as this will be used automatically in searches. A Short Club Name is usually the club abbreviation, such as PE or N4C.
7. Use the “Domain Names” tab to indicate how you and your members will access the website. A default has already been set for you. If you end up using the Photo Club Services website as your club website, you would specify your club’s domain name here and change the DNS registration to point to the website.
8. Use the “Administration, Manage Club Members” menu item. This will list all of your past and present club members and allow you to set roles, competition levels, and personal information for each member. You may either have each club member create their own account or you may use the “Import Member List” button to import a member list. Directions are displayed if you use the button.
9. When you get a new club member or if you have club members create their own accounts, the Webmaster (club website administrator) amd membership manager will get an e-mail indicating that a new user has created an account. The webmaster or membership manager must then go to “Administration, Manage Club Members” and approve the membership and set competition levels and roles.
10. Roles are used to define permissions assigned to members. The roles are described when you click the “Edit Roles” button for a user.
11. Use the “Competitions, Manage Competition Definitions” menu item. This is where you will specify the characteristics of your competitions. To make this process easy, we recommend you import the definitions using the “Defaults for Basic to Masters Levels”. If you want a combination of the old competition levels mixed in with the new levels, import from the Peninsula Camera Club, Club Id 3003329. You would only want to do this if you are going to upload old competitions that used the older levels.
12. You have now completed your basic website setup. You may now create competitions using the website or the Image Competition Manager 2 program.

Setup the Image Competition Manager 2

A new version of the Image Competition Manager (ICM) program is used with your website. You may have both the old version and the new version installed at the same time. They do NOT share files and must be kept separate.

1. Download and install the new ICM program from http://photoclubservices.com/ICM/download.shtml.
2. When you start the ICM program the first time it will not have your club definitions. On the form that displays, click “New Club”. Enter your Club Id you saved from your website. This Id uniquely identifies your club. Specify a new folder for the “root folder”. This folder will hold subfolders with your new competitions. Be sure to start with an EMPTY folder. Enter in your website Login Name and password, the same ones you used to login to your website. If you gave others the role of “Competition Manager”, they may use their credentials. NEVER SHARE PASSWORDS. Each person must use their own personal Login Name and password when using the ICM program and website.
3. Clicking “Start Job” with synchronize the ICM program with your website. For this initial use, your definitions will be downloaded from the server hosting your website.
4. When the transfer completes, you are ready to create competitions. The ICM program at this point will operate in a nearly identical manner as in the original version. The major difference is that members and their competition levels must be defined before images can be entered into a competition. You do not specify competition levels when importing or cataloging images since the levels already defined for the user will be used.

Importing Old Competitions from ICM v1

The Peninsula Camera Club has been using the ICM program for 3 years. We imported all of our competitions and images for the last 2 years into the new ICM program, which allows them to be displayed on our website. You are welcome to do the same, but be aware that the old competitions used different competition levels and these levels need to be available when you import the competitions.

If you do not have the old competition levels defined, you need to add them to your list of competition levels. You cannot merge in competition levels from another club at this point because that would duplicate your existing levels and competition types. Use the steps below to create the old competition levels.

1. Use the menu "Competitions", "Manage Competition Definitions".
2. On the Competition Types tab, create a new Competition Type named "Old Levels" that will be used as a template with the old level names.
3. Use the Competition Levels tab and define the competition levels for your new "Old Levels" Competition Type. These would be "B", "A", "AA", "AAA", and "Masters". It is OK if you are not using all of these levels.
4. After you save the new levels for "Old Levels", you can import these levels into your other Competition Types. Using the "Competition Levels" tab, select the Competition Type to update and set the "Copy Levels from" to "Old Levels". Do NOT check "Clear existing levels". Click to Import button to copy the levels.

If you import old competitions, you will also need to import old members, even if they are inactive. Each competition entry refers to a member and the import of a competition will be rejected if it cannot determine the name of the author. The message will provide you with the name of the missing or unrecognized member.

We found that member names were often misspelled. The way to correct this is to correct the entry in the old ICM program and then repeat the import process. It is highly recommended that you have ICM v1 and ICM v2 on the same machine to make this process easy and to allow you to restart the import process quickly.

1. To import old competitions, create new Competition Groups in a structure that makes sense for your organization. You might review the competitions at http://PeninsulaCameraClub.com to see how we did this.
2. With the ICM v2 program, create a Competition, set the Competition Type and click Save. The other values will be imported. Remember that the two versions of the ICM program must not share the same folders.
3. Use the “Import/Export” tab for your competition. Click the “Import Competition” button. Specify the folder used by the OLD ICM program to hold this competition. You do NOT create an export from ICM v1. You will import directly from the ICM v1 folder. Uncheck the all of the check boxes and click “Import”.
4. If you get errors on the import, it is easiest to fix the data using the old ICM program and try the import again. The most likely errors are misspelled member names. If you have missing users or missing competition levels you can add these using the ICM v2 Club item in the tree on the left and using the Members tab.

Submitting Images Using the Website

Members may logon to the website using their own Login Name and password. This will identify the user and provide access to their personal images. New competitions should be created in advance, generally using the website, but may also be created using the ICM program.

1. Club member must logon to the website before they can submit images for a competition.
2. Use the “Competitions, Submit Images to a Competition” menu item. Click “Select” on the competition you wish to enter.
3. Use the “Upload or Catalog and Image into the Competition” button. You may use this button to enter titles for slides and prints even if they do not have a file to upload.
4. You may re-enter previously uploaded images, if allowed by your club, using other options on this page. Attempts to upload duplicate images or titles will be rejected.
5. It is highly recommended you use the “Check Spelling” button to check the spelling of your titles. The other fields on this form are described on the form.
6. When you click the “Add Image” button, any file specified will be uploaded to the server hosting your website.
7. You may remove or modify the image information using the buttons provided.

Synchronizing ICM with the Website

Images, club definitions, competitions, and member information are all shared between the website and the ICM program. Images and information changed with the ICM program must be sent to the server and images and information changed on the website must be sent to the ICM program.

To synchronize all of your competitions, use the “Club” tree item on the left of the ICM program. Use the “Import/Export” tab and click “Send and receive Updates”. You will need your website Login Name and password. DO NOT SHARE PASSWORDS. Each person using the ICM program should use their own account.

Instead of synchronizing the entire club, you may also use the “Import/Export” tab for any Competition Group or Competition.

If a competition has not yet been judged, all images for the competition are transferred, regardless of the setting of the “Transfer only Winning Images” checkbox. The checkbox is useful, however, if you only need to display winning entries on the website.

It is possible that some transfers may take many minutes, depending on the speed of your Internet connection. During a long transfer, you may actually close the ICM program and the transfer will continue invisibly in the background. If you reboot your machine, the transfer will resume as soon as it notices you are reconnected to the Internet.

If you exit the transfer form, you must return to the form for the data to be processed. You may also use the form to cancel a transfer that is in progress.