I tried figuring it out, but couldn't do it. I know what you mean though, I just don't know how it was done in the past.
As goat585 mentioned, we're just trying out a few different things, listening to feedback, and then incorporating good ideas offered by the members going forward. As with most things in life, it'll never be perfect where it makes everyone happy, so we need to do our best to make as many people happy as we can, while also keeping the spirit of the competition alive.
Personally what I'd like to see going forward is to have themes each month, but I imagine that would be problematic based on how many participate in each of the competitions. For example we could have an Acro month, and two people submit pics. That kind of defeats the purpose of community and competition. We really want everyone to have a good time with these competitions and be able to participate every month.
The one thing I know for certain is that there doesn't seem to be a way to include pics in the polling feature. I definitely tried that and it didn't work for the images that I was able to get to display.