Hi @AlanA,
When we launched our community we thought we would be clever and repurpose the Contests module as a project gallery to encourage people to share photos of their completed projects. It worked well to encourage photo sharing a create a place that was easy to contribute to and easy to browse. The downside was that members were confused whether to share their project on the gallery, the discussion boards, or both. So we ended up retiring it.
More recently we ran a competition to find Australia's best D.I.Y. projects. Rather than use the Contests module which only allows people to share one photo and no text, we just added a new label and any posts with that label appeared on our competition gallery.
Hope that helps. In summary, the Contests module could be fine for a very specific use but there are other ways to encourage photo sharing and run community competitions.
Jason
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