Here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know. Flickr blocks non-camera-generated images from public viewing areas, including rss feeds! I found this out recently in trying to set up a flickr group for “Godly Creative People](http://godlycreatives.com/ in which members can upload and share images of their creative works. The idea is to have people submit an image to the group and those images would appear (via flickr badge) on the GCP home page.
What I discovered the first day I put it up was that many of the images were not appearing at all. They showed up on the group page, but not in the badge, or even the rss feed (which I attempted as a work-around to the badge).
Flickr is a PHOTO-sharing site
In doing some research, I found a number of forum posts on flickr describing something called NIPSA(Not in Public Site Areas), which is a way of flagging images for non-public viewing. Essentially, flickr examines images as they come in to see if they’re actually photos or if they’re some other type of file, and then they mark the non-photos as NIPSA. Then, if your account has too many NIPSA images, your entire account could be flagged NIPSA, which would exclude all of your images from public viewing.
Staff member, Heather, copy/pasted a piece of the FAQ in response to the forum questions:
“Flickr is a website for you to use to share your photos. If the images you’re uploading either (i) aren’t photos, or (ii) are images you’ve ‘borrowed’, stock photos, celebrity photos, stuff that appears to be copyrighted by someone else, screenshots, porn or nudity/partial nudity, it’s safe to assume that we will probably have marked you as NIPSA (Not In Public Site Areas); otherwise, your account is in the review queue, and will be attended to shortly.” “Flickr FAQ](http://www.flickr.com/help/photos/#69
Now, clearly issues like nudity or copyright are completely valid, but what about artwork? Personally, I had no idea Flickr was for photographs exclusively. Instead, being a web 2.0 child, I was under the impression that an app is what its users make of it. But, I respect their desire to keep it a site for photographers to share their photographs.
How exactly do they tell a photograph from a non-photograph?
The only way I can see them doing this is by the EXIF(Exchangeable Image File) data which tells the original device that created the image. In the case of my photographs, the device is a Canon PowerShot S2 IS. This appears on every photo I upload to flickr. Things like screenshots, or for example, my recent “desktop images](/blog/design-is will not show EXIF data, which will mark them as non-photos. I’ve seen scanned images not showing up as well, so that means we need to have an actual photograph with EXIF data in order for the image to appear in feeds or badges. I haven’t read anything about this particular method on flickr, so it’s just a guess.
So now what?
Now, we’ll just have to take photographs of artwork instead. It won’t always be as pretty, and it surely won’t work for Illustrator or Photoshop creations, but it will do for now. A couple of things…
If you open a photo in Photoshop, tweak it and save it again, you should be fine because Photoshop saves the EXIF data. However, if you save it as a PSD or EPS, or if you copy the image into a new Photoshop file, you will lose that data, so your image will no longer appear as a photo.
I have “suggested](http://www.flickr.com/forums/ideas/28014/ that Flickr consider a way for groups to allow NIPSA images within their group, so we’ll see if flickr is receptive to the idea.
In the meantime, the GCP group will stay as is, and people can still see your scans, screenshots, etc. The images will just not appear outside the flickr group. And, from what I’m reading, flickr has nothing against non-photos in general and it’s perfectly okay to continue uploading them. We just need to accept the fact that these images will be discriminated against. :)
“More on NIPSA](http://www.flickr.com/forums/help/12823/?search=NIPSA
Elliot Swan left a comment on September 29, 2006 at 5:11 pm | #
HmmEXIF data is the only way I can think of that they’d be able to do this as well, yet many people (such as me) who upload photos to Flickr do Photoshop work on them then re-save, which will strip that data off, and my photos are still showing up in my badge.
This is from the Flickr Community Guidelines:
It’s all somewhat strange.
Natalie left a comment on September 29, 2006 at 5:18 pm | #
You know, I’ve been digging around problem solving and I’m noticing that there are a lot of images which are clearly not photos still showing up in a badge or feed. I’m not sure now. I’ve tried a number of my own images and Brian Z was helping out too, and the ONLY consistency in the images not appearing was the lacking EXIF data.
Joe Lencioni left a comment on September 29, 2006 at 5:24 pm | #
I’m guessing that Flickr wouldn’t filter images based on missing EXIF data because that batch would include photos taken with film cameras and scanned.
Truitt left a comment on September 29, 2006 at 5:31 pm | #
This is all very interesting
I remember seeing an app a while ago that enabled you to edit or add EXIF data to an image. Although a pain, I wonder if this would be a possible work around?
Natalie left a comment on September 29, 2006 at 5:35 pm | #
Joe, that’s what I thought too, since there are still people who [gasp!] don’t have a digital camera, but scanned images so far have been blocked too.
Truitt, I’m not so sure editing EXIF data is good either though because a lot of people rely on the accuracy of that information, and much like a car’s odeometer, I would hate to see people start messing with that essential data.
Joe Lencioni left a comment on September 29, 2006 at 5:42 pm | #
Also, I’m not entirely sure how they are doing it technically, but Fadtastic has a new design trends gallery called TrendWatch that uses Flickr for hosting their images that aren’t photos
Natalie left a comment on September 29, 2006 at 6:31 pm | #
That’s a plugin for Wordpress which I’ve used on occassion too, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work with groups. I’ll see if I can get in touch with the developer and see if he knows.
Andrew Faulkner left a comment on September 30, 2006 at 12:25 pm | #
Hi. Andy from fadtastic here. TrendWatch uses a plugin for WordPress called falbum. It basically pulls down images from the TrendWatch Flickr account. Any questions? I’m ahppy to describe the inner workings.
I didn’t know that flickr was just for photos.That’s quite shocking actually. More people I know use flickr for screendumps than photos.
adam left a comment on September 30, 2006 at 11:45 pm | #
@andrew-i think NIPSA is actually a response to screenshot “˜abuse’. honestly, i think it’s an okay direction for them to push the service in. it’s not that you’re not allowed to host non-photos on their site. it’s just that if users are digging through the “˜blue’ tag, they probably don’t want to see a lot of BSOD’s.i’ve seen a lot of nasty comments on non-photos left by other users. so i think it’s safe to say that most users do prefer to only browse photos.
Natalie left a comment on October 1, 2006 at 9:23 am | #
Actually, Andrew, according to flickr, it was originally to weed out pornographic images and copyright-protected images not owned by the uploader. Screenshots are an afterthought, which flickr admits they use often themselves. Beyond screenshots there are scans of drawings and other artwork too, and I’m sure a long list of other types of non-images.
Also, they’re not pushing in this direction because it’s not new apparently ““ has been there from the get-go. It’s just that people are now starting to see the effects of uploading non-photos. I wouldn’t say “most users” prefer to see photos because I’ll bet the number is even across the board, but in strictly image browsing areas like flickr’s home page, it would make sense to show only photos.
My complaint was with private groups not being able to pull NIPSA images outside. Apparently it’s not possible to distinguish group images with rss or badges because the engine behind it pull from the public pool.