Exhibition Tracker is built to solve one specific problem: photographers who enter salons need to know, at any moment, exactly which of their images has been accepted where — and when they hit a BPE crown milestone or plan a FIAP distinction application, they need that data in the exact format the awards officers expect.
This post is a full walkthrough for a brand-new user. Five minutes end-to-end.
Step 1 — Create your free account
Head to the register page and enter your email and a password. You'll get a verification email (from Resend) — click the link and you're in. No card, no trial, no upgrade nag.
Your account has two separate dashboards: BPE (for UK British Photographic Exhibitions acceptances) and FIAP (for international FIAP-patronaged salons). Their data is completely isolated — a BPE acceptance never leaks into a FIAP count, and vice versa. This matters because the two schemes have different scoring models and application formats.
Step 2 — Add your first BPE salon
Sign in and you'll land on the BPE dashboard by default. The table is empty except for a single "Add new" row at the top. Type in:
- Exhibition — the salon name (e.g. "Robin Hood Open").
- Year — the year of the salon.
- Image Title — your image title exactly as you entered it.
- Section — pick from the dropdown or add a custom section.
- Award — leave blank unless you won something.
Press Enter or click the green tick — the row is saved. The "Acc." checkbox marks whether the image was actually accepted; tick it if the results email confirmed the acceptance.
Repeat for each acceptance. If you have four accepted images from the same salon, that's four rows — one per image.
Step 3 — Watch the summary update
As you add rows, the summary panel at the top of the dashboard updates live: total acceptances, distinct exhibitions, per-year breakdown. This is your BPE crown progress bar.
Click the chart icon to open the full Statistics view — it breaks down acceptances by year, salon, section and image title, so you can see which of your photographs is doing the heavy lifting.
Step 4 — Or: bulk-import a CSV
Adding rows one at a time is fine for new salons as they close, but if you've got a spreadsheet with years of history in it, use Import instead:
- Click the Import button on the dashboard.
- Pick your CSV or Excel file.
- The dialog previews the file and auto-detects columns (Title, Salon, Year, Section, Award, Acceptance flag). Remap any that don't line up.
- Choose Acceptances-only or import every row. Non-accepted rows are stored with the "Acc." checkbox unticked so you can still review them.
- Click Import — done.
This works for spreadsheets from PhotoContestPro exports, your own home-grown Excel logs, or a mate's spreadsheet template you're inheriting. Column mapping handles the awkward differences.
Step 5 — Export the BPE crown matrix
Once you're closing in on a BPE crown milestone (25, 50, 100, 200, 300 acceptances) you need to submit an application to the BPE awards officers. Click Export → Matrix and the app generates the exact Excel format the crown application form expects — image titles as rows, salons/years as columns, ticks in the cells where each image was accepted.
No copy-paste, no manual formatting, no risk of an off-by-one error at application time. Send the file and get on with your day.
Step 6 — Switch to the FIAP dashboard
If you're entering international salons too (and if you're not, read our international salon walkthrough), click the FIAP link in the header or sign in via /fiap. The FIAP dashboard works the same way but adds:
- FIAP Patronage number field (yyyy/xxx) — the international salon identifier.
- Country field — required for the FIAP distinction ladder.
- Auto-fill from FIAP No. — type the patronage number and the app pulls the salon name, country and full section list from myfiap.net. Days-per-year saver.
Step 7 — Add a custom section (if needed)
Both dashboards ship with the standard section lists (Open Colour, Monochrome, Nature, Creative, Portrait, Scapes, and the FIAP Theme lists). If a salon uses a non-standard section name, open the Section dropdown and pick "+ Add custom section". Type the name — it persists to your account and appears alongside the built-in list from then on.
Step 8 — Search and filter
Once you've got a few dozen rows, the search bar at the top of the table filters across Salon Name, Year, Country, FIAP No. and Image Title. Search "Autumn Bridge" and you get only the rows where that image was accepted — not the salon-siblings. Massive for narrowing down where a specific image is succeeding.
The "Acceptances only" toggle hides any row where the "Acc." checkbox is unticked, so you see your accepted-only history at a glance.
Step 9 — Bulk operations
Every row has a left-hand checkbox. Tick multiple rows and Bulk Delete lets you clear typos or old test data in one click. Combine with the search to bulk-delete every row matching a search — handy when you accidentally imported the same file twice.
Step 10 — Download the User Manual
If you'd rather learn from a static reference than a blog post, the full User Manual PDF covers every feature with screenshots. It's generated fresh from the live app so the screenshots always match the current UI.
What next?
Once you're logging comfortably, the two features most beginners miss are the FIAP patronage number auto-fill (saves hours when logging catalogues) and the per-image Statistics view (tells you which of your photos to keep entering).
Not signed up yet? Create your free Exhibition Tracker account — you'll be logging your first salon in under a minute.