Well, I understand your feelings diana, but if you're going to submit art for shows and contests you'll find out the there is a myriad of ways galleries and such handle this kind of thing. I agree with you an auto response would have been nice and I think it also would have been nice if the losers had gotten an email to the effect of: "Thank you for you submission for the Zygote Calender Contest unfortunately we are unable to use your image at this time. With so many wonderful submissions it was a difficult choice to pick out 12 images out of the 500 or so we received. Keep up the excellent work and we hope you will consider submitting images to any of our future contests. Thank you, the staff at Zygote" However, maybe this was too difficult with so many submissions, shrugs I don't know... The advice I would have for you, diana, to try to detach yourself from the outcome. I'm sure you did a wonderful job, but there are so great artists out there that competition was stiff. As I mentioned above, I've been in on the selection process for juried shows and sometimes its personal preference for an image and not so much skill and talent. I think we should start our own "Loser Gallery" LOL