Photo Vault Online

16 January 2020

On 27 February 2010, the first Photographic salon closed
after receiving 3768 images from 314 photographers.

Up until 2009, digital photographic salons in South Africa relied on email for receiving its entries.

In the second half of 2009 we got a glimpse of a better way when one particular salon was making use of a website for their entries. We, the Salon committee of the Emfuleni Circuit salon, discussed the possibility of using this for our biennial circuit salon, due to take place in February 2010.

There was one glaring issue with their approach – they required that the participants provide their credit card information over an unsecure internet connection. As committee, we decided to approach them asking to rectify this issue by procuring an SSL certificate for their site. After several communication efforts, by the end of November, we realised this is not going to be in place before we need to start receiving entries for our salon. We decided to drop the idea and to continue using emails for our entries.

But, once you tasted the good life, it is difficult to go without it. By 15 December 2009, I, as a software developer by profession, decided to embark on the development of a salon entry system that would not require the participants to provide their credit card details in order to participate. The first beta release was available for testing in the first week of January 2010. After some rigorous testing the salon committee gave the go-ahead for using the system for the upcoming salon.

On 12 January 2010 the PhotovaultOnline.com domain was bought and on 16 January the site went live.

The envisaged benefit of using PhotovaultOnline.com for salon participation was two-fold

1. To enforce size constraints on the entered photos.
   With email entries, the biggest issue was participants who entered their photos in wrong size formats - usually too large to be displayed correctly for judging. This resulted in a huge effort to get the photos in the correct size.
2. The second was to save on bandwidth usage.
   Back in 2010, internet connections were still very slow, and Photovaultonline.com provided a solution for this problem; Once you have entered your photo in the “vault”, you could use it in many events without the need to re-upload the photo. Although bandwidth is cheaper and more readily available today, this vault idea is still benefitting the PhotovaultOnline participants today: I did a quick check and the last salon of 2019 (The Bloemfontein National Digital Salon) received a total of 3841 entries of which 2993 were used in a previous event and then reused in this salon!
   

We immediately realised the potential of also using PhotovaultOnline for our monthly club entries and both the Vanderbijlpark Fotografieklub and the Vereeniging Photographic Society used PhotovaultOnline already for their February 2010 club entries. (almost like a last beta-test…). Krugersdorp Kameraklub followed in March and Bethlehem Kameraklub in April. By the end of 2010, 10 clubs had joined PhotovaultOnline for their monthly club entries. Today, 90 clubs are using PhotovaultOnline on a monthly basis for their club entries and of those clubs, 75 are also using it for the club advancement administration.

PSSA is also using PhotovaultOnline's vault for their own photo related activities as well as for the collection of information required for tasks such a Diamond Ratings and the DPSSA honours confirmation.

There are more than 9000 registered accounts on PhotovaultOnline and the Vault currently contains more than 980,000 photos! Based on the statistics of 2019, the members of PhotovaultOnline upload on average 10,000 photos per month. At this rate we can expect the millionth photo milestone around April 2020!

Over the past 10 years, 1.4 million photos were entered to be judged in one way or another. The judges surely had a busy time!

After 10 years of hard work, PhotovaultOnline could do with a facelift. The technology used to build PhotovaultOnline has also advanced at an exponential pace. I am currently working on version 4 of PhotovaultOnline which will include some enhancements as well as a new user interface, with a planned implementation date to be announced soon. (The new interface will also be much more mobile friendly.)

Up until now, members found it very difficult to use their own vault information in their preparation for DPSSA and Diamond Rating applications.

To celebrate the 10 years of image collection, there is now a new functionality in your personal vault to get an overview of all previous salon entries that could count towards your DPSSA and Diamond Ratings.

There is also another project in development that will help members to get a better appreciation for their photos in the Vault, but I cannot say much about it at this stage...

The fact that I could effortlessly link to Edward's photos' thumbnails that he entered 10 years ago in a salon, again shows the amazing potential of such a photo vault. Maybe we should harness this treasure!

To close off this celebration, here are the thumbnails of the medal winners of that historic first Salon hosted on PhotovaultOnline.com