The purpose of WeeklyShot is to provide a venue where photographers can explore a new subject matter each week. It's less about being competitive, and more about community, contribution, and learning from each other. Some members use it simply to exhibit their work, while others use it as a means to improve via feedback from peers. All users have the ability to upload 3 images per week, so you can submit one of your best photos and you can upload another photo that you're unsure about and wish to receive feedback on. Please keep in mind that we actively encourage our users to provide open, honest, and respectful feedback. If you're not interested in this kind of feedback, WeeklyShot may not be for you.

To avoid any sort of popularity contest, and to promote honest feedback, each image is anonymous until you've commented and rated it (or until it is featured on the homepage.)

We have a very open policy when it comes to submitting. You can pretty much submit anything you want: it can be an old image or a new one, film or digital, photoshopped or not.

We only really have two rules:

1. You need to have taken the image and own the copyright.
2. You can't put your name on the image or otherwise mark it, because that will destroy the anonymity.

We do realize it's possible for you to recognize a photo previously published on someone's website, but not everyone will recognize the same image so we haven't made any rule against posting previously published images.

Sometimes people accidentally upload the wrong image, or hit submit twice - causing a duplicate submission. These get removed. While we do not actively censor the responses, we reserve the right to remove any images which are clearly inappropriate.

Your image must be between 600 and 750 pixels on the longest side and have a filesize of less than 400kb. We have put these parameters in place so that what you upload is what will be displayed. No resizing will be performed (except when thumbnails and preview images are created.) This ensures that your image appears exactly as you uploaded it and also guarantees that everyone's photos will fit within the size limits of the site.

Images are featured primarily based on user ratings, but there are also several other factors that determine homepage placement. The details are kept secret in order to make it more difficult for people to manipulate the system.

We've broken the ratings system into 5 different categories: relevance, impact, composition, technique, and image quality. So, even if you don't get any comments, you should still at least be able to get an idea of what people thought you did well and what they thought you could improve.

We also have some ideas for increasing the rating/commenting activity among users. Hopefully, we'll be able to get those new features implemented soon.

Yes, they are available to the photographer. They get to see their average score in each of the five rating categories and there is also a calculated overall average score. During a challenge, a photographer will see their rating only after their photo has been rated at least 9 times.

We've decided to keep the raters anonymous, because we want them to feel free to rate as honestly as possible. We also encourage raters to score images based on their own personal tastes. It is not our intention to impose any objective rating guidlines, so it's completely up to you to rate things however you see fit.

Until an image is featured on the homepage, or the challenge has ended, comments are out of view from the public to ensure an unbiased reaction. It's very interesting to read through the comments once the challenge has ended. Sometimes what makes an image appealing to one person is exactly what another person dislikes.

The red labels are there to make it easier for you to see which images still could use some ratings and/or comments. We're trying to promote user activity and involvement. The stars indicate that the image has been featured on the homepage, and the check marks tell you that you've already rated or commented on that image.

Right now things are pretty open. You can invite anyone you want and the system doesn't check to see if they've already been invited. So far, it looks like this open policy hasn't caused any problems at all.

If you do accidentally invite someone who has already been invited, then you *will* lose that invite... but you will likely get more invites down the road, so it's probably not that big of a loss. Up till now we've been issuing new invites about every week or so... We'll likely continue to do that until there's a reason for us to stop.

In any event, you're certainly free to send the person an email before you invite them to ask if they've already been invited. That should help to avoid any lost invites on your part.

Feel free to visit our development queue page to see what we have in store and what we've recently accomplished. This list is updated every week or two.

We're very open to suggestions. As a user of the site you are in the best position to tell us what works and what doesn't. Feel free to send comments and questions to our discussion group.

Right now WeeklyShot is by invitation only and it's likely that we'll remain that way for some time to come.