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Hi Matt and Rod....
I have a TTG based website for my community photography club now for several years. One of the features our members enjoy is a monthly photo contest. In the past the process has been that the members needed to send through email their photo entry and I would have to import them into my lightroom and publish them to a CRG and then use the feedback option to allow members to vote on the photo they think is best. This was manageable when the club was small but over the past two years the club has grown to close to 100 members. I credit this growth to the website as they did not have one before I and TTG came along. Thank you by the way. I was hoping you could help me with a contest software solution that works well with your plugins. I have tried a php solution that uses codeignitor as its framework and had a bit of trouble injecting it into my site along with the TTG plugins so I set up a new domain to host it and linked it to our site. Unfortunately it was crap. Uploaded photos were distorted and un-sharp. I need to replace it and was hoping you could offer some direction to a suitable solution. I was hoping for a way for members to upload photos to a specific advertised contest and then have other members with the ability to vote on those photos. I will include the contest page I have now as it has all of the features I am looking for but the photo display is just horrible and that discourages participation. I am a huge fan of your work and value your opinion greatly.
Oh by the way I am giving a website building workshop for the club members on May 23rd so expect a mad rush on plugin purchases. We have about 25 members signed up right now. I will be teaching them the basic pages set up, CRG and publisher. I can only anticipate more workshops on the other plugins in the future. You make it so easy for us photographers and we are forever grateful.
Thank you
Ken Seelye
Last edited by ksseelye (2015-05-02 06:39:59)
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Hi Ken,
Matt will have to comment, but I don't think this is a possibility.
TTG, by design, is really meant for single photographer use and there is no facility for multiple users when it comes to Publisher
To do something like you envision seems to me would require everyone to have Lightroom and purchase Publisher. And then someone would have to administer granting access and explaining to each person how to set up Publisher. Even if that is feasible, they all couldn't submit to the same album since Publisher is Lightroom catalog dependent, meaning they'd all have to be publishing from the same catalog.
And I doubt a separate upload utility is feasible considering the time it might take for Ben to code something like that. It's just not cost effective.
I think you're stuck with folks emailing you their submissions and you (or someone) managing it all through one Lightroom catalog.
Another thought: have you looked around to see if there might be a WordPress plugin that would allow what you're after? You'd need to give all members a username and password to the site and probably author privileges.
And one more thought (it might even be a good one):
I've not looked into it, but I think you might be able to import images from Dropbox. Not sure, but Terry White writes about using Dropbox here: http://terrywhite.com/lightroom-dropbox/
If this works, then you could just give your members access to a certain folder every month and let them upload. You'd still be on the hook for importing into Lightroom and managing the CRG, but it eliminates one step for you. If it works......
Let me know how your website workshop goes. I'm in the middle of planning some myself. Probably a combination of TTG and Wordpress. I'd be interested in hearing about your experience with it.
Rod
Just a user with way too much time on his hands.
www.rodbarbee.com
ttg-tips.com, Backlight 2/3 test site
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Holy crap! You can import from Dropbox. It actually works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEFVUNZN4U
Rod
Just a user with way too much time on his hands.
www.rodbarbee.com
ttg-tips.com, Backlight 2/3 test site
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Hi Ken,
As Rod says, our system is really designed for single-source publishing -- one user, one catalog, etc.
It looks like Dropbox may be the easiest and best solution for what you want to do. You can setup a shared folder in your dropbox account, allowing your club members to upload photos to that folder. Lightroom can watch and auto-import uploads, which you can then pull into Publish Services to add to your gallery. You might be able to use smart collections to further automate this process, but I'd have to check into it more to say for sure. From there, you'd just need to publish.
If your members are not already Dropbox members, you should have them use you as reference when they sign up, which will increase your personal storage allotment.
Does this sound like a workable solution for you?
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