Community guidelines

Photographs made in public places, in the six categories the site is built around: Street, Architecture, Night, Urban landscape, Documentary, Street portrait. A frame that would sit comfortably in any of those belongs here.

Post your own work, once. Write alt text that says what is in the frame rather than what it means. Where you know the place, say something useful about standing there: the hour the light works, the side of the street to wait on, whether a tripod will get you stopped.

What does not belong:

• work you did not make, however freely it was available elsewhere;
• generated images presented as photographs — if a frame was made by a model rather than a camera, this is not the place for it;
• composites assembled from several moments and presented as one. Processing a frame is photography; building a scene that never existed and captioning it with a street corner is not;
• anything whose point is a person’s humiliation, and anything published to settle a score with somebody in it.

The technical bounds, for completeness: at most 25 MB per file, at least 800 by 800 pixels, and up to 20 photographs a day.

In much of the world it is lawful to photograph people in a public place. Lawful and decent are not the same question, and street photography lives in the gap between them.

The test worth applying before publishing is simple: would the person recognise themselves as the subject of a photograph, or as its target? Do not publish a frame whose only content is somebody’s distress, poverty, disability, intoxication, illness or grief. A sleeping rough-sleeper is not a composition.

Children need more care than adults, not less. Avoid publishing an identifiable child without the agreement of whoever is responsible for them.

If someone in a photograph asks you to take it down, take it down. You do not have to agree that they are right, and you do not have to explain yourself; removing it costs you one frame.

Several countries require consent for publication regardless of where the photograph was taken — France and Germany among them. Publishing is your decision and the law that applies to it is yours to know.

A pin is an invitation. It tells strangers that something worth photographing is here and that they should come and stand in it. Most of the time that is the best thing about the site. Sometimes it is the reason not to add one.

Never pin:

• a private home, including your own if anybody else lives there or next door to it;
• a shelter, a refuge, a clinic, a school, a place of worship under threat, or anywhere a published coordinate increases the risk to the people who use it;
• a place where standing there is dangerous or unlawful — a rooftop, a tunnel, a live railway, a restricted site. Marking it as a photographic location sends somebody else there after you.

Where a place is genuinely sensitive but worth knowing about, pin the street or the district rather than the doorway. Every published coordinate is rounded before anyone sees it, and a moderator can coarsen or withhold a point entirely; the privacy notice sets out the precisions involved.

Appreciation is a single mark of respect from one member to one photograph. It is not a score you can stack, and it cannot be given twice by the same account.

So: no second accounts, no arrangements to appreciate each other’s work in bulk, no scripts. Both sides of a swap are treated the same way, because both sides knew.

This matters more than it might sound. Appreciation feeds the trending order, where recent appreciation counts for more than old — the weight halves roughly every 36 hours. Manipulating it does not just flatter one photograph; it decides what every visitor to the site is shown next.

Where manipulation is found the counts are corrected and the accounts involved are suspended. Correcting a count is not a punishment, it is an accounting fix: a number on this site is supposed to mean what it says.

A place entry is only worth having if it is right. Use the name people actually use for it, the city and country it is in, and a coordinate you are confident about rather than one you guessed from memory.

Submissions are reviewed before they appear. Automated checks look for a coordinate outside its stated country, a point within 120 metres of an existing place, suspiciously round coordinates and a few other patterns. Those checks produce signals for a moderator to read and never a decision — a duplicate flag on two genuinely different doorways is exactly the sort of thing a person has to settle.

If a published place is wrong, report it with the reason The location is wrong or misleading and say what is wrong in the note: the corrected name, the right side of the street, the coordinate that should be there. A correction is far more useful than a removal, and much more likely to be acted on quickly.

Access notes and restrictions — permits, opening hours, a tripod ban, a fee — are only shown when a moderator has recorded where the claim came from. A restriction note nobody can source is worse than none at all, because it either sends people away from somewhere open or walks them into somewhere closed.

An editor’s pick is chosen by a person at FRAME because they think the photograph deserves to be seen. It is always labelled as a pick, it is never paid for, and it is never traded for anything — not money, not reciprocal promotion, not a favour.

There is no promoted placement on FRAME, no paid position in the trending order and no sponsored collection. The orderings the galleries offer are described in the interface, including what each one actually sorts by, so that nobody has to guess whether a position was bought.

If that ever changes, the change will be labelled plainly as advertising and announced before it happens. A site that shows other people’s work has nothing to sell except whether it can be believed.