I have an idea. Can I do it? (text, picture, phone, but not ute content)

For the last 4 years I’ve hosted a photo scavenger hunt. Teams would solve riddles or puzzles, or just follow instructions and get pictures of specific things. At the end of the hunt, they’d all come back to the park, I’d upload the pictures, award points, and declare a winner. It’s fun. Up to this point I’ve specified each team had to have a digital camera, not a phone, with a removable memory card so I’m not going through 1000s of pictures of peoples cats looking for the scavenger hunt pictures. Dedicated digital cameras are not as common as they were a few years ago.
So, I was thinking. Is there a way teams could take the pictures with a phone, and text that picture to something other than my phone for judging? I’m wondering if there’s a web site or a service that would receive the pictures, and maybe plop them in folders sorted by the phone number that sent them? That would work GREAT for me. Any ideas?

You could create a photobucket account with a folder for each team. Give everybody the log in and they could upload to their respective spot.

All of your major cloud storage providers will do photo sync from their app. They'll all also let you relatively easily share files.

You might also look at Microsoft Xim. It lets you share photos on a temporary basis, where the holder of the device that took the photo can control the slideshow.

I would suggest asking participants to take photos at the lowest resolution their camera supports, unless you're going to make prints. It'll speed everything up.

I would recommend that you set up an account with Evernote and then create a folder for each team.

• Evernote will give you a unique e-mail address for your account that allows you to e-mail things right to it.
• Each team will simple e-mail their photos to that e-mail, but each team places "@their_folder_name" in the subject line so that their photos go in their folder.
• Whatever they add to the subject line becomes the name of the entry, so they can easily organize things for you.
• They can even add addd a #tag to them to identify which category they are for.

At the end of the day you have access to all photos, either online or on your mobile device, and you can easily sort and manage them. All your participants need is the ability to text or e-mail photos from their phone, no apps to install or accounts to setup. Plus, they name and tag the photos to save you having to figure it out.

I've participated in something similar, where we had to have a photobucket account (who doesn't, these days?). Create a folder for the event, and send the link to the judge, at the end.

I just ran an event for the local RX-7 club. We used twitter. Everyone used a smartphone for the pictures and tagged the club account (I think - @EDM_RX7 anyways) and captioned the picture. It worked perfectly and all I had to do was periodically refresh the feed and record the teams point counts.

Another option: have them email the pics, and just set up your email program to display by sender. Voila, done.

Instagram with a very specific hashtag seems like the easy button here.

There are services that set this kind of thing up for weddings - maybe try that angle to find something?

I remember looking into it when I got married a few years ago, but I don't remember any of the places that did it. But they basically set up a number for guests to text their photos to, then collected them all in an album, sorted by sender.

Of course, since it's wedding related, it's probably 3 times more expensive than normal, but you could maybe steal the idea somehow.

Now that i think about it I bet you could set that up through Google Voice. Set up a number, have everyone text it to that, then you can sort through them on your computer. You could also set up google voice to forward them to an email account automatically.

I like the google voice idea. Twitter seems very easy, but not everyone participating (myself included) is on twitter. The pictures will be sent from anywhere in the county, so I think texting will work better than email. I'm Looking into google voice tonight.
Thanks to all for your suggestions. This board is awesome.

so.. are we going to be allowed to play too?

Uhhh, sorry. It's at max capacity.
Chrysler did it for the employees one year and I thought it was cool so decided to do it for friends and family. It's grown over the years and wow is it a huge thing to put on.