Best of Ocean City Photo Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best of Ocean City Photo Contest is

OceanCity.com, the town's visitor-facing website, runs the Best of Ocean City Photo Contest as a public photo vote for fans of the Maryland resort. The ballot is a Crowdsignal poll at poll.fm/15378264, and its title doubles as the instruction: Vote for your favorite photos. You can pick up to 5. Everything a supporter needs sits in that one line, which is why the contest reads more like a quick poll than an application-and-judging competition.

The answer list reads like a postcard rack for the beach. It names scenes such as Dolphins with pier and beach, Clouds over the beach, Kids on the pier, Sunrise, Sunrise with bird, Kids embracing the beach, amusements in silhouette, kayaks, arch and dunes at sunrise, and the visible list trails off with an ellipsis, so more frames sit beyond what a reader sees first. The photographs are titled by subject and not by photographer, which keeps attention on the image itself.

The 2024 and 2025 rounds and when they fell

The poll series has been dated from April 2024 through May 2025, and both a 2024 round and a 2025 round are verified. Within each year the voting months are April and May, which places the contest in the weeks when the resort season is just getting started and photographers are sharing fresh frames of the beach and boardwalk.

For 2025, OceanCity.com also published a blog post titled around voting now to decide the winners of the Best of Ocean City 2025 photo contest, which opens with a greeting to Ocean City, MD fans and the line that it is time to make their voices heard. That post is the clearest evidence of how the organizer introduced the round to its audience. The poll page prints no opening or closing day for any round; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Supporters planning ahead should also watch OceanCity.com for each new announcement, since a blog post introduced the 2025 round to readers before they reached the poll itself, and a post of that kind is the natural first sign of a new cycle.

How a supporter votes on the Crowdsignal ballot

Voting on this contest is a single screen of choices. A supporter arrives at poll.fm/15378264, reads the list of photograph names and ticks the images that deserve a place on the shortlist, with 5 as the ceiling named in the title. Then the vote is submitted and the poll registers it. The format rewards decisiveness: a voter who wants to back a single sunrise image can tick it alone, while someone torn between dolphins at the pier and dunes at sunrise can back both.

The ballot as displayed reads Poll Closed, and each name shows 0% beside it, so the numbers visible today are not a ranking. The page text does not describe a cap on how often a person may return, an account requirement or any screening of repeat submissions, so none is claimed here; those rules belong to the live poll and to OceanCity.com's announcements.

Because several picks are allowed, a supporter's effort goes further when it points at a photograph and also names a short list of other favorites to tick alongside it.

Ocean City's poll next to Maryland's readers' ballots

Maryland's other public ballots on this site are mostly readers'-choice awards run by newspapers and magazines, such as Best of Baltimore, Baltimore Style Readers' Choice, Baltimore Sun's Best, Baltimore's Child Readers' Choice Awards, Best of Annapolis and Best of Frederick. Those contests ask readers to name businesses and people across many categories.

The Ocean City contest is smaller and more visual. It asks one question about one kind of content, photographs of the beach and the town, and it uses a lightweight Crowdsignal poll instead of a branded awards site. The organizer is a destination website, not a publication with a print readership, so the audience is people who love the shore rather than people who read a newspaper. That difference shapes outreach: a beach-photo poll travels through vacation groups and social posts, while a business award travels through customers and staff.

Gathering support for a favorite beach photograph

Support in a multi-pick poll comes from persuading people to include your photograph among their choices, not from asking them for a single exclusive vote. OceanCity.com has published no statement in the page text about outside help, so its own announcements are the reference for what is acceptable.

A direct link to poll.fm/15378264, a note naming the photograph's title and a reminder to tick it alongside other favorites is a tidy request. The votes guide sets out outreach habits for public polls, and the award votes page explains the paid route that some entrants research. Nobody can promise a result in a public poll, and the organizer's published terms decide what is counted.