If you enter international salons, you've felt this pain: a catalogue lands with 15 salons in it, and each one wants its own row in your acceptance log with the correct salon name, correct country, correct FIAP patronage number and correctly-named section codes. Typing that out is a solid 20-minute chore. Doing it once a week for years is a hobby-quality-of-life issue.
Exhibition Tracker's FIAP dashboard has a lookup that turns the whole thing into a two-second field paste. This post is the walkthrough.
What the lookup actually does
On the FIAP dashboard, at the top of the "Add new" row, there's a compact input labelled Auto-fill from FIAP No.. Type a FIAP patronage number in the standard yyyy/xxx format — for example 2026/295 — and press Enter.
The app calls the public FIAP Patronages directory at myfiap.net/patronages and pulls back:
- The official salon name (spelled and cased exactly as FIAP records it).
- The country the salon runs in.
- The full section list — Open Colour, Nature, Themed etc. — with the descriptive names FIAP publishes.
Those values pre-fill the new-row form. All you type is your image title and pick a section from the dropdown. Save. Done.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Manually typing salon data isn't just slow — it's error-prone. Two mistakes that regularly torpedo FIAP distinction applications:
- Mistyped salon names. A single character off ("International Salon of Photography" vs "International Photography Salon") means the salon doesn't match FIAP's records and your entry gets flagged during verification.
- Wrong country tag. Country coverage is a hard requirement for every FIAP distinction level. Getting a country wrong on one row costs you a country in the count.
Auto-fill removes both classes of error because the data comes straight from the source of truth.
The exact number format
FIAP patronage numbers are always yyyy/xxx — a four-digit year, a forward slash, then the number the patronage was assigned. Examples: 2026/045, 2025/318, 2026/295.
Where to find the number:
- In the salon's prospectus PDF — usually on the first page next to any other patronage numbers (PSA, GPU etc.).
- On the entry platform (photocontestpro / myphotoclub) salon detail page.
- In the results email — most salons include the FIAP number in the header.
- In the final catalogue PDF — always in the front matter.
If a salon claims FIAP patronage but you can't find the number anywhere, check myfiap.net/patronages directly — you can search by salon name and it'll return the patronage number.
What happens when the lookup can't find the number
Two situations to be aware of:
- The number is mistyped. The lookup rejects anything that isn't in yyyy/xxx format. Check for a missing slash, typo'd year, or extra digit.
- The patronage isn't published on myfiap.net yet. New patronages sometimes take a day or two to appear in the public directory. If the salon website says "Applied for FIAP patronage" but the number isn't up yet, log the salon manually for now and re-run the lookup later — the app will auto-populate any missing details.
Speed tip: session caching
The app caches lookups for your browser session. If you look up 2026/045 once, subsequent lookups of the same number are instantaneous — no round-trip to myfiap.net. Handy when you're logging four sections of the same salon: the first lookup takes half a second, the next three are instant.
The cache clears when you close the tab, which is fine — myfiap.net's data doesn't change day-to-day.
Section codes vs section names
FIAP's directory uses short codes in some places (T1, OpenC, NAT, PhtT etc.) but the descriptive names — Theme 1, Open Colour, Nature, Photo-Travel — are what appear in the official salon catalogue and on the FIAP application forms. The tracker deliberately shows the descriptive names, not the codes, so your exports read cleanly and match the paperwork.
Custom sections are supported too — if a salon runs a section that isn't in the FIAP standard list, pick "+ Add custom section" from the dropdown, name it, and it'll persist to your account for future rows.
What the lookup does not do
A few sensible limits:
- It doesn't fetch your acceptance data — only the salon metadata. FIAP doesn't publish per-photographer results publicly.
- It doesn't cover PSA-only or GPU-only salons. Those aren't in the FIAP directory. Log those manually with country and section as usual.
- It doesn't work offline — you need an internet connection for the first lookup of any given number.
The workflow that stops chore-guilt building up
The single biggest win from auto-fill isn't the seconds saved per row — it's the elimination of the "I'll log those catalogue salons later" backlog. Because logging is now trivial, you do it the moment you enter or the moment results land. No catch-up sessions. No forgotten FIAP numbers. No end-of-year "what on earth did I enter this year" audit.
That's the point: a tool becomes indispensable not when it does something impressive once, but when it makes the boring stuff too cheap to procrastinate on.
Where next?
Read our full Exhibition Tracker walkthrough for the rest of the app's power tools — CSV import, bulk operations, Excel matrix exports and per-image Statistics.
Not signed up? Create your free Exhibition Tracker account — auto-fill lookups are unlimited on the free tier, along with everything else.