Terms of use

Anyone may read FRAME. Browsing photographs, places and profiles needs no account and no sign-in.

An account is for people aged 16 or over, or the local minimum age for consenting to online services where that is higher. One account per person. An account is personal, is not transferable, and the password on it is yours to keep to yourself.

FRAME may decline to create an account, and may close one, for the reasons set out under suspension below.

FRAME is a community archive of street photography. Use it for that. In particular, do not:

• publish a photograph you did not make, or that you do not have the rights and permissions to publish;
• publish anything unlawful, anything that harasses or endangers a person, or anything that sexualises a child;
• pin a photograph to a private home or to a place where a published coordinate puts somebody at risk, which the community guidelines set out in detail;
• inflate appreciation with second accounts, reciprocal arrangements or automation, or interfere with the ordering of what other people see;
• scrape the site, work around a rate limit, or try to reach another member’s drafts, private collections, email address or reports;
• file reports you do not believe, which wastes the time a real one needs.

Uploads are also bounded technically: at most 25 MB per file, at least 800 by 800 pixels, JPEG, PNG, WebP or AVIF, and up to 20 photographs a day. Those limits exist to keep one account from running up everybody’s costs, not to judge your work.

You keep the copyright in every photograph you upload. What uploading grants FRAME, and what it does not, is set out in the copyright notice.

By publishing a photograph on FRAME you confirm three things:

• you made it;
• you have whatever permission the law where you were standing requires from a recognisable person in the frame, or from the owner of a private property;
• publishing it breaks no contract, court order or embargo you are subject to.

FRAME reads the EXIF in a file to fill in the camera, the lens and the settings for you. That is a convenience and nothing more: EXIF says which camera produced a file, not who holds the copyright in the photograph, and FRAME does not treat it as evidence of ownership either way. A file with no EXIF at all is published on the same terms.

Alt text is required on every photograph because a published image without it is not published to everybody. Write what is in the frame.

You remain responsible for what you publish. FRAME is the venue, not the author, and a claim about a photograph is answered by the person who uploaded it.

You can delete your account whenever you like. What that removes, and what survives it, is described in the privacy notice.

FRAME may suspend an account where there is:

• a credible claim that a photograph on it is not the uploader’s work;
• repeated disregard of the community guidelines after being told;
• manipulation of appreciation or of the ordering of the galleries;
• harassment of another member, or of a person in a photograph.

A suspension is recorded with a reason and the reason is shown to the account it concerns. A suspended account can still read FRAME but cannot publish, appreciate, submit a place or change a collection. Suspension is not deletion: the work is hidden, not destroyed, while the matter is settled.

Every one of those decisions is made by a person and can be revisited by a person. If a decision about your account was wrong, say so and it will be looked at again.

The record of a moderation decision is kept even after the photograph or the account it concerned has gone, because a record of why something was removed is what stops the same dispute reopening from the beginning.

FRAME is provided as it is. While the project is in development it may be unavailable without notice, may lose data, and may change in ways that are not backwards compatible. Keep your own copies of your photographs.

The shooting notes, access notes and restrictions attached to a place are written by members and checked by moderators against a recorded source. They are not a guarantee. Whether a place is safe to stand in, open to the public, or legal to photograph is for you to establish locally before you go, and it can change between the note being written and your arriving.

To the extent the law allows, FRAME is not liable for indirect or consequential loss arising from use of the site, including lost work, lost income or a journey made on the strength of a location note. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

The operating entity, the governing law and the forum for a dispute are not yet settled and must be named here before FRAME is launched. Until then this document describes intent, not an enforceable agreement.

These terms will change as the product does, and the date at the top of this page records when they were last read through.

A change that materially affects what members may do, or what FRAME may do with their work, will be announced in the interface before it takes effect rather than quietly published. Continuing to use FRAME after that notice means accepting the change; if you would rather not, you can remove your work and close your account.

The current version always lives at this address. There is no separate paper copy that says something different.