What you need to know about online photo communities

By Nadine Hantke Apr 18, 2010, 17:24 GMT

Frankfurt - Photography has never been this easy. Millions of amateur photographers are out there snapping billions of images and they want a platform to present their masterpieces.

Web-based photo communities have sprung up to satisfy the desire. Yet there are a few things that users should know from the start: not everything that wanders in front of the camera may be published.

Photo communities continue to demonstrate tremendous growth, says Werner Luettgens from the German magazine Colourfoto. Any conversation about photo portals usually starts with flickr.com. It belongs to Yahoo, with several billion images stored on its servers. Google has answered with the web albums of picasaweb.com, as well as the geotagging service through panoramio.com. Geotagging is used to mark a photo so that the location where it was taken appears on a map.

Gabriela Uerlings from fotocommunity.de thinks she can explain the growth of photo communities: photographers crave recognition, which is part of why they flock to places where they can show off their work. Amateur photographers want praise, critiques, and discussion - and these sites provide that. In essence, the portals have come to function more like social networks than internet-based photo albums.

The chance to submit photos effortlessly can make some submitters forget that the entire process is still subject to laws and obligations. Most communities point to this in their fine print, but how many eager amateur photographers actually read through the terms of service when they sign up?

'In general, you should remember that you can only publish photos that you've taken yourself or where the photographer has given permission,' says Thomas Lapp, a Frankfurt-based lawyer for information technology law. Things get extra complicated if other identifiable persons appear in the images. 'In those cases, the photos can usually only be published if you've gotten each person's permission,' Lapp says.

Photos of copyright-protected objects are another tricky area. 'Even if I take my own photos of the pieces in a modern art museum, I'm not allowed to publish the images and most definitely not allowed to earn money through them,' Werner Luettgens warns.

Extra caution is required for some works of art or symbols. No nighttime photos of the Eiffel Tower in Paris may be published, for example. Copyrights for the illuminated structure are held by the lighting artist Pierre Bideau. 'We've made an arrangement with the copyright holder so that illustrated images of the Eiffel Tower may be shown in our community so long as they include a statement noting the copyright holder,' Uerlings explains.

Even snapshots of animals at the zoo can be complicated. 'The zoos have the right - and hence may decide - whether photos taken at their zoo may be published,' Uerlings says. Some are strict about this. Collages including advertising images or replicas of film posters are another sensitive spot.

There's one more person who should be given consideration before uploading photos: yourself. Lapp recommends that amateur photographers read through the portal's general terms and conditions before submitting even a single photo. 'You should check out in detail which rights you are ceding by posting to a given community,' says Lapp.