What size should my uploaded photos be?

December 3rd, 2017 ( Updated 6 years ago )

So that the judges can get a good view of your photos, your uploaded photos should be at least 1000 pixels wide or high. If you try to upload a photo that has less than 187500 pixels in it, you will see an error message, and the photo will not be accepted. We prefer photos to be larger, so that we have better proof that you took that photo, rather than copied it from a website.

The maximum size allowed for an uploaded photo is 5000 x 5000 pixels. The dimensions of the sides could be different to this example, but if it has more than this number of pixels it will not be accepted.

Sometimes our server does struggle to process large photo files when they have been decompressed. If your photos are failing to upload please try making them smaller. The most important thing is that the photo is large enough for the judges to see it and for this it can be much smaller than the 5000x5000 maximum. If for example, a 5000x5000 pixel jpeg file is decompressed then it would take up about 95MB. The PHP memory limit on our server is set to 128MB. There could be many processes using up a significant proportion of this before an image is processed and this is why we cannot process some very large image sizes.

Resolution values are ignored. It's just the size of the photo in pixels that are important.