2006-02-10
09:14
Flickr Publish Guidelines
There’s been some controversy over Flickr – do they allow posting of drawings or not? What if you take a photo of your drawing? Does that count?
They’ve cleared things up now, by posting their guidelines, and it seems pretty reasonably, but it does make it clear that they want the site to be for photographs, not drawings…
With some exceptions, it’s OK to post other images, but if the majority of your photostream contains content other than photographs (like illustrations, screenshots, diagrams, etc.) it’s very likely that your account will be marked Not in Public Site Areas (NIPSA). NIPSA means your photos won’t show up in photo searches, but they will still be visible in your pages, your groups and contacts.
They’ve also set a policy for hotlinking. Flickr is one of the few sites you can use to host photos that you’re actually posting elsewhere. You can post the images on your blog, but have them hosted at Flickr, so they deal with the bandwidth of serving all those pictures, whilst you reap the rewards of having lots of pictures on your blog. The rule they’ve set is that you can still do this, but you have to link to the picture on Flickr…
pages on other websites that display images hosted on flickr.com must provide a link back to Flickr from each photo to its photo page on Flickr.
Again, this seems reasonable to me, and it’s the way most people have used this feature anyway. It may limit some people’s usage, but now it’s part of Yahoo!, they probably can’t go around giving something for nothing.
It is so utterly foreign to me that Flickr would impose a “we don’t like illustrations” opinion on their site. Sure, it’s okay to say, “no big dickie in mouthie photos,” as it’s fair not to be porntastic, but no illustrations? Crud! I must be one of those…what was it? Nipsy Russells? Whatever you said. I’m definitely one of them. Most of my stuff is photos of my sketches.
In about 6 days, when I give them 25 bucks, I’ll be posting even more non-photos. How weird. Images. Photos is a limiting factor, n’est pas?
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chrisbrogan.com
Regardless of the subject matter, if you’ve used a camera to capture it, surely it’s a photo?
If a tripod falls in the forest and there’s no one around, does the camera on it take a picture?
Hmm.
I think I need more tea.
Sam Harris Creative Wanderer and Wonderer
Boing Boing linked to a pool where people were submitting drawings of hobos, and people noticed that pictures started vanishing from the group – turned out they were Nipsying some people, but not others. It did seem after a while as if they were only doing it to people who just signed up and posted a few drawings, whilst people who posted quite a few photos too were ok.
It all seemed quite dodgy when they weren’t actually being up-front about what they were doing, so it’s good to see it clarified, even if it makes Flickr less useful for people who want to use it to share drawings.
Maybe time to give deviantART a go, or aren’t you goth enough?
“Maybe time to give deviantART a go, or aren’t you goth enough?”
(sigh) I’ll go and get me eyeliner…
Sam Harris Creative Wanderer and Wonderer