In any camera club, the role of competitions secretary is one of the most demanding. Whoever takes it on needs to be comfortable with computers and willing to put in a good deal of time and effort to make each competition run smoothly. There are entries to handle, competitions to set up, and the presentation to run on the night. The stakes are high, too. If an image is missed or shown incorrectly, or if anything else goes wrong, everyone in the room notices.

Competition software was meant to make all this easier. The trouble is that most of the programs available try to cater for every quirk of every club, and in doing so they become complicated and awkward to use. You find yourself having to remember obscure keyboard shortcuts in the middle of a competition. Many of these programs also sit poorly on modern high-resolution screens, where the text and menus end up far too small to read or operate comfortably.

PixMark takes a different approach. It is designed to be simple, friendly and genuinely helpful. The layout follows the natural flow of the work, so the controls you are most likely to need are the ones placed front and centre.

It can also take care of the fiddly jobs for you, such as resizing images, checking the colour space, making sure an image has not been entered before, and producing reports.

The whole idea is to make the competition secretary’s job an easy one, and easy enough that almost anyone could pick it up and manage it.

These features are all supported in the beta version:

• Works on both Windows 11 and macOS
• Single club competitions scored by marks (for example, points out of 20)
• Single club competitions scored by places (1st, 2nd, 3rd, Highly Commended, Commended)
• Import a whole folder of JPG images into a competition at once (compatible with PhotoEntry exports)
• Import a single image into a competition
• Automatic matching of names, even when they are entered inconsistently:
  • Bob, Rob and Robert, or Steve, Stephen and Steven
  • Fred Bloggs, F Bloggs, F. G. Bloggs ARPS, or Bloggs, F
  • It even copes with simple typos, such as Andrw or Amdrew for Andrew
• Checks that images are the correct size, with the option to resize them for you
• Can recognise images that have been entered before, so nothing slips through twice
• Export a competition as a single package to move it to another computer running PixMark, working seamlessly between Mac and PC
• An opening run-through slideshow showing each image with its title
• A presentation for the projector, paired with a separate dashboard on your own screen
• The dashboard shows the current and next images, the scoring options and the navigation controls
• The ability to hold back certain images for review later
• A lightbox that gathers held-back images together as thumbnails, which can be used either for scoring or for moving between images
• A scoreboard summary of the competition shown on the projector
• A closing slideshow with titles, authors and scores
• A PDF report of the competition, complete with images, titles, authors and scores
• A second PDF report listing every entrant alongside their entries and scores
• Properly signed downloads that install cleanly, with no security warnings
• Full GDPR compliance, so removing an entrant clears their details from every log and database

Coming soon:

• An email autoresponder that processes, checks and accepts members’ entries automatically
• Support for more competition formats, including inter-club competitions

In return for helpful feedback, beta testers will get free access to the test versions, along with a discount on a 12-month licence once the software is released.

The price has not been set yet, but it will take the form of a 12-month licence. The reason for the annual arrangement is that distributing software on the Apple and Microsoft platforms requires security certificates, and these carry a significant cost to maintain each year.

My aim is simply to cover those costs and to provide something genuinely useful to the camera club scene.

The licence will be per club, which means it can be installed on any of the computers used within the club. It will not depend on the size of the club, the number of competitions you run, or anything similar. It is just a single flat charge each year.

Ease of use comes from simplicity. PixMark is built around the 80/20 principle: we concentrate on the main ways clubs run their competitions, and we deliberately avoid offering lots of customisation, because that would make the software far more complex and much harder to use.

That said, we do intend to support some further competition types in time, though probably not in the beta versions or the first release.

Many clubs have their own quirks in how they run competitions, and tradition can make those quirks difficult to question. We believe, though, that a degree of simplification is worthwhile, and that it makes the competition secretary’s job considerably less of a chore. If detailed customisation matters a great deal to you, this may not be the right tool. If simplicity and ease of use are what you are after, then you have come to the right place.

Looking around the camera club scene, there is clearly a roughly even split between photographers who use Apple’s macOS for their work and those who use Windows.

If we want to encourage more people to take on the role of competition secretary, it makes sense to give them tools on a platform they already know and feel comfortable with.