How We Built a Digital Photo Competition for Sierra Canyon School

The Problem

Sierra Canyon School runs an annual photography competition for their students. It's a big deal for the Visual Arts Department. Students submit their best photos, teachers review them, and the school community votes on winners.

The problem? The whole thing was running on paper. Students would print submission forms, attach their photos, and turn them in physically. Teachers would sort through stacks of entries. Voting happened with paper ballots.

It worked, but it was slow. Danielle, the teacher running the competition, was spending hours on logistics that had nothing to do with actually evaluating photography. And students were frustrated too. Half of them take photos on iPhones. Printing photos from your phone is annoying.

She reached out asking if there was a better way. There was.

The Approach

We could have pointed her to an off-the-shelf form builder. Google Forms, Typeform, something like that. But none of them would really solve the problem.

Here's what she actually needed:

• Students submit photos directly from their phones
• Teachers review and approve submissions before anyone sees them
• Anonymous voting so students don't just vote for their friends
• Results that update in real-time

No single tool does all of that. So we built it.

The key decision was making it mobile-first. These are high schoolers. They're not going to sit down at a computer to submit a photo. They're going to do it from their phone between classes. The whole experience had to work perfectly on a 6-inch screen.

The Build

Submission Wizard

We built a multi-step submission wizard. Students enter their info, upload their photo, add a title and description, and submit. Simple. But there was a catch.

iPhones save photos in HEIC format. Most web browsers can't display HEIC images. Teachers reviewing submissions on their laptops would just see broken images.

So we added automatic conversion. When a student uploads a HEIC photo from their iPhone, we convert it to JPEG in the browser before uploading. They don't have to think about it. It just works.

Teacher Moderation

Every submission goes to a review queue first. Teachers can approve or reject each entry. If there's an issue with a submission, they can send it back with notes. Only approved photos show up in the voting pool.

This was important. You can't have students voting on unreviewed submissions. And teachers needed a way to manage the whole thing without spreadsheets.

Anonymous Voting

Here's the tricky part. How do you let people vote without knowing who submitted what?

We used magic links. When voting opens, eligible voters get an email with a unique link. Click the link, you're in. No login, no password, no account to create. But the link is tied to your email, so you can only vote once.

We also built two voting modes. Classic voting (pick your favorites) and ELO voting (compare two photos head-to-head). The ELO system is borrowed from chess rankings. It's surprisingly fun.

Results Dashboard

Real-time results for teachers. They can see which photos are leading, how many votes are in, and who hasn't voted yet. When voting closes, they export the winners.

The Result

The platform launched for the 2025-2026 school year. The whole process that used to take Danielle hours now takes minutes. No more paper forms. No more printing. No more counting ballots by hand.

Students can submit from anywhere on their phones. Teachers can moderate from their laptops. The school community can vote with a single tap. And at the end, you get clean results with zero manual counting.

What I Learned

Schools have a lot of manual processes that could be digital. Not everything needs a full platform. But when the workflow is unique enough, off-the-shelf tools just create more work.

The photo competition is a good example. It's not a survey. It's not a contact form. It's a specific workflow with specific needs. Building something custom took two weeks. The alternative was years of fighting with spreadsheets.

Also: HEIC conversion matters more than you'd think. Half of web development is dealing with edge cases that seem obvious in hindsight.