Catch logging from the boat

Whether you run a small club bass tournament or a multi-division walleye series, the catch logging form is what anglers interact with most on tournament day. This page describes every field, the photo handling pipeline, and the anti-cheat settings available to organizers — so you can walk into the event confident your anglers know what to expect.

How anglers log a catch

From any tournament dashboard, anglers tap the Log Catch button. The form presents the following fields in order:

• Division— if you have configured multiple divisions, this is pre-filled from the angler's registered division and cannot be changed. In single-division events the field is hidden.
• Species— a dropdown filtered to the species allowed in the angler's division. If you have enabled Calcutta side pots, a toggle lets the angler expand the list to species outside their division (these catches count toward side pots but not the main leaderboard).
• Weight and/or length — which fields appear depends on the measurement method you configured for each division (weight, length, or both). The length field uses a dedicated numeric input that enforces a minimum of 1 inch and a maximum of 300 inches. The weight field accepts decimal values in pounds to two decimal places.
• Evidence photo — required for every catch. See below for how this works.

Camera capture vs. gallery upload

By default, anglers can either take a photo with their device camera or choose an existing image from their photo library. The file input accepts JPEG, PNG, WebP, and HEIC formats. Files larger than 10 MB are rejected before upload with an error message.

For files between 3 MB and 7 MB, the app automatically compresses the image client-side before upload and shows a confirmation line (for example, “Compressed from 4.2 MB to 1.1 MB”). For files above 7 MB, the angler is prompted to confirm compression before the upload proceeds; they can alternatively choose to wait until they are back on Wi-Fi. On slow or metered connections the soft-warning threshold drops to 1 MB so that even modest photos are compressed before upload.

Compression uses the device's Canvas API to resize images to a maximum width of 1,600 px while preserving aspect ratio, then re-encodes as WebP (falling back to JPEG on browsers that do not support WebP encoding). The process is entirely client-side; no uncompressed version is ever sent to the server.

Anti-cheat: requiring camera capture

If photo integrity matters for your event, enable Require camera capturein the Scoring step of the tournament wizard (under “Verification & photo settings”). When this option is on, the gallery file picker is replaced by a live camera view. Anglers must open the camera, frame the fish, and tap Take Photo — there is no way to submit a pre-existing image through the normal flow.

Additionally, each camera session is paired with a time-stamped verification code (a short alphanumeric string fetched from the server immediately before the camera opens). The code is burned into the bottom-left corner of the captured image using the Canvas API before the photo leaves the device. This means the verification code is baked into the pixels of the evidence photo itself, providing a tamper-evident timestamp that can be compared against catch submission time during review.

If a participant's device cannot open its camera (permission denied, no hardware, or a browser limitation), the app shows platform-specific instructions for re-enabling camera access and, as a last resort, offers a file-picker fallback. Fallback uploads do not receive the verification code overlay, which you can treat as a signal for closer manual review.

Trophy shots

You can optionally enable trophy shots in the Scoring step. When enabled, anglers may upload a second photo — a vanity shot holding the fish, showing the scenery, or both — that is separate from the measurement evidence photo. The trophy shot is displayed in the activity feed and on the leaderboard in place of the evidence photo; the evidence photo is still required and is always available to admins during review. This keeps the public-facing catch wall visually engaging without compromising the integrity of your evidence record.