Version 2.1 — 19 September 2026. The competition is not yet open. Entry dates, jury members and prizes will be published before launch.
1. Organiser and theme
The Eindhoven Photography Challenge is organised by Eindhoven Creative Community (ECC), an informal initiative of Pieter van Engeland, Frank van de Ven and Yamil Baptista. Central contact: Pieter van Engeland, Winkelcentrum Woensel 201, Eindhoven, hello@eindhovencreativecommunity.nl. Theme: “Your Eindhoven. Your frame.”
2. Eligibility
Entrants must be 18 or older. Anyone may enter regardless of residence or nationality, provided the photograph was made within the municipality of Eindhoven. The entrant must be the photographer and have the rights needed for the entry and licence.
3. Entry requirements
- entry is free;
- one photograph per entrant through the current flow;
- JPG/JPEG, PNG or WebP, maximum 10 MB;
- name, email, title, short story and location are required; Instagram is optional;
- newsletter and ECC interest are separate optional choices;
- uploads remain private until moderated and approved.
4. Real photography and AI-assisted editing
The entry must start as a genuine photographic capture made by the entrant with a camera or phone. AI may assist editing only where the result remains recognisably a genuine photograph of the captured scene. Normal crop, lens/perspective corrections, exposure, colour, contrast, local tonal work, noise reduction, sharpening, upscaling and limited retouching are allowed. Fully AI-generated images, text-to-image foundations, substantial generative scene expansion, material addition/removal/replacement of people or subjects, or compositing that creates a substantially fabricated scene are not allowed. ECC may ask for the original file or an explanation of editing.
5. Copyright, third-party rights and moderation
Copyright remains with the photographer. Entry does not transfer copyright to ECC. Entrants remain free to use, sell or license their own photograph elsewhere. Entrants must ensure the entry and agreed use do not infringe third-party rights. ECC may refuse, hide or remove an image where there is a substantiated privacy, portrait-right or other rights concern. Approved public copies are re-encoded so EXIF/GPS metadata is removed from the public version.
6. ECC licence
By accepting these rules, the entrant gives ECC a non-exclusive, royalty-free worldwide licence to use an approved image for the challenge and for ECC marketing, including the gallery/results, ECC website, ECC organic social channels, newsletter, promotion of future editions, general ECC promotion and paid ECC advertising/promotion.
ECC may start new promotional uses up to two years after the final result. After that ECC will not start a new promotional campaign using the image, while the gallery and existing historical web/social publications may remain online as an archive. ECC may make necessary technical/editorial adaptations such as resizing, compression, cropping, colour-profile conversion, layout, text/credit and ECC branding, but may not materially alter the message of the image without a further agreement. ECC will not sell the image as stock, use it for merchandise or grant third parties an independent commercial exploitation right. Credit is provided where reasonably possible.
7. Voting — 40%
Each voter ranks exactly three different approved images: first = 3 points, second = 2, third = 1. Public points are normalised to a 0–100 score, with the highest valid public total receiving 100 and other entries scored proportionally.
8. Jury — 60%
Jury members will be announced before launch. Each juror scores four equally weighted criteria from 1–10: (1) connection to the theme/Eindhoven, (2) creativity and originality, (3) photographic quality, (4) story and impact. The average jury score is converted to 0–100.
9. Final score and tie-break
Final score = 40% normalised public score + 60% jury score. Exact ties are resolved by total jury score, then photographic-quality score, then creativity/originality score and finally a reasoned joint jury decision based on the published criteria. There is no lottery tie-break.
10. Dates, prizes and withdrawal
Submission dates, voting dates, jury and prizes are not yet final and will be published before the competition opens. Entrants may withdraw before public voting begins. Later withdrawal requests may be honoured where practical without disproportionately affecting competition integrity. Statutory privacy and portrait-right requests are assessed separately.
11. Gallery, changes and privacy
All approved entries may remain in the challenge gallery as an ECC competition archive. New promotional use stops after two years, while legitimate privacy, copyright and portrait-right requests continue to be considered. ECC will make material changes, suspend or cancel the competition only where reasonably necessary. Personal data is processed according to the Privacy Statement. Dutch law applies.