Photovault Honours Applications

HONOURS APPLICATION ON PHOTOVAULT

Introduction

PhotovaultOnline.com has been modified to allow for entering of PSSA Honours applications in digital photography online.
Only the entering of the photos is handled by PhotovaultOnline. You still need to follow the normal prescribed way to obtain your application number, and you still have to ensure that you have read all the documentation about an honours application as published on the PSSA website before uploading your photos.
Once you are ready to upload your photos, follow the normal procedure to upload your panel of photos using the “My Photo Vault” option as described previously. (In fact, if one or more of the photos you want to use in your panel, were previously uploaded and used in one of the other events or competitions hosted by PhotovaultOnline.com, you do not need to upload them again).
To assign your photos to your honours application, click on the “My Entries” menu option and select the correct Honours Application.

The Honours Application Entry Screen

There are a few extra fields on the Entry Screen for honours applications:

  1. Honours Application Number: The Honours and Awards committee will provide you with a unique number on request. Enter your application number here.
  2. Manipulated Panel: If one or more of the photos in your panel are manipulated, mark this field accordingly. Remember that no nature or PJ panel may include both manipulated and non-manipulated images.
  3. Application Attempt: Use the dropdown list to indicate whether this is your first attempt or not.
  4. Specialised Panel: Use this field to indicate whether this is a specialised panel, and if so, also describe the specialisation in the block provided.

The Honours Application Category

You will notice that the honours application list consists of 3 categories. Normally you will only enter one category (the first panel) as the extra two categories are there for members who apply for multiple specialised honours at the same time (in order to achieve their VERS). To assign your panel of photos, click on the supplied link.
The next screen is the familiar Entry Category Browser you use for uploading your photos in any other competition. The list will contain the following number of empty slots where you should upload your panel of photos.

For a Licentiate application, the list will have 10 empty slots. For the Associate application, there will be 15 empty slots, while the Fellowship application will have 25 empty slots. You should assign a photo to each of the empty slots according to the specific application.

Assigning a photo

Click on the “Select Photo” link in one of the empty slots to assign a photo to your panel.
The normal screen used to link one of your photos with your entry was amended with two extra fields:

  1. Photo Reference Number: You must supply the photo reference number for each photo in your panel. Ensure that you follow the guidelines as specified in the Honours & Awards
    documentations when naming your photo.
  2. Existing credit. Tick this box if this photo was awarded a credit in a previous Honours application cycle (this applies when your application is not a new application).
    Click the “Save” button to save the information and return to the previous screen.

Finalising your application

Once you have assigned all the photos for your panel you must should on the “Finalise my Entry” button. A popup screen will ask you to confirm the terms of this application. Once you click on the
“OK” button an email will be sent to your email address that will serve as proof of your submitting your application.

Appendix B –Troubleshooting

  • I did not receive the registration confirmation email

Certain email service providers mark auto generated emails as spam to protect their users. This is mostly a good practice, but it does mean that you must – from time to time – check your spam folder for legal emails which was incorrectly flagged as a spam message.
To flag a message a spam it gets rated for its possible spam content. Luckily the rules for these rating engines do not get published, and they are actually changing on a regular basis – otherwise the real  pammers will just make sure their spam mail slip through.
A good example of this is Yahoo mail. They flag almost any mail containing a hyperlink as a spam message. So if you are a yahoo subscriber, you must make sure that you check your mail on a regular basis. All registration confirmation emails of photovaultonline.com will land in the Yahoo spam folder. To rectify the problem, simply open your spam folder, select the photovaultonline.com
email and mark it as “Not Spam”.
Microsoft Outlook has its own building spam rules, so it could easily happen that the same problem could occur if you are using Microsoft Outlook as your mail client.
In most cases, once you’ve marked one email as “Not Spam”, all subsequent emails from the same address will be treated as not spam and will go directly to your inbox – bit there is no guarantee that it could not end up in spam in the future as the service updates its spam rules engine.
The following example shows how to rectify the problem in yahoo.

  • I cannot remember my login id or password

On the login screen is a link to reset your password. You need to supply either your login id or your email address (so, if you cannot remember your login id and / or your password, you will still be ok if you have a using email address, but if you use a shared email address (like family members using the same email address) you will need to supply your login id. In the latter case, if you cannot remember your login id,  send us an email using the “contact” page and we will send you your login id (note that we cannot send you your password as the password is encrypted and we cannot decrypt it).
Tip: When resetting your password, you will be asked your security question. Make sure you type the answer correctly. If you, for instance, used spaces in your answer, you will need to provide the
answer with all the spaces included.
Remember that the password reset function is also going to send you emails as part of the process.
Make sure you check your spam folder if it looks like you did not receive the emails.

  • I did not receive a confirmation for my entry

There are several tests you can do to make sure that your entry is correct;

  1. On the “My Entry for…” screen, ate the bottom, underneath each category link, it will show the list of the titles of entries for that  category.
  2. If you click on the category link, it will take you to a page where all the photos entered for that category, is list. Each entry will show a small thumbnail as a visual confirmation that the entries for that category are correct.
  3. On the “My Entry for …” screen, just above and to the right of the list of categories, is a button called “Finalise My Entry”. When you click on this link an automated email will be send to you with the full details of your entry. (Remember to check the spam folder if you do not receive this email.)

  • I paid for my entry at the bank and do not have an electronic proof of payment to upload

  1. If you have the paper version, take a photo of it with your digital camera and upload that as the proof of payment.
  2. If you don’t have any proof, create a word document (or use any other editor such as notepad on windows) and explain in the document your payment dilemma. If you can remember what key words you used in your payment, mention it in the document.

Remember, the proof of payment is just to help the administrators to reconcile their books at the end of the competition, so any information to help them in their reconciliation will be appreciated. Once done, upload this document as your proof of payment.