Umbraco
Case Study

National Geographic Photo Contest

Umbraco Awards Best New Tech Winner

National Geographic is well known for its breathtaking photography. Every year the company also organizes a contest where everyone can submit their photos of nature. A platform for this contest was exactly what DotControl set out to build for National Geographic, using Umbraco CMS. This case is a beautiful example of how AI and an intuitive workflow can be combined to save a lot of time for all users of the site. No wonder it's an Umbraco Awards  Best New Tech winner(2019). DotControl will tell you how they crafted it all:

Photos (and platform) that captivate

Known for its phenomenal photography and amazing content about nature, National Geographic is the place we go to feast our eyes on the most beautiful nature shots. 

Every year, they organize a huge photo contest where everyone can share their love for photography.

 

This year, National Geographic challenged us to deliver a new intelligent platform for this contest, improving the usability, scalability and accessibility.

Using Umbraco, we set out to build a solution that not only showed the photos at their very best, but also were user-friendly for photographers submitting their work.

How it changed, how it works

To sign up for the photo contest, amateur and professional photographers could now upload their photos in the upload wizard. All the uploaded pictures were analyzed and EXIF metadata was automatically extracted from the raw image files.

 

We also automatically suggested tags based on the actual subjects in the images using Cognitive Services Computer Vision API. 

Before the submitted photos were reviewed by the judges, we got artificial intelligence to help automatically detect potentially offensive content and filter them from the other submissions.

Our agency is data-driven, so all picture metadata was collected for later analysis using data science. 

Our team of growth hackers gathered and analyzed tons of analytics data to improve the website every day.

In the end, in a very short deadline, we made sure that amateurs and professionals could enter this prestigious contest and come together to share their love for photography.

"National Geographic, in collaboration with DotControl, completely renewed the website of the National Geographic Photo Contest. It was a challenging project in which the CMS had to comply with complex user stories for different types of users. The end result: a very nice website and tailor-made CMS that the entire team is proud of!"

Dorien Beckers, Digital Product Manager, Fox Network Group

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