Photo guidelines

What we accept

• Photos you took yourself, in Bloomington or elsewhere in Monroe County.
• Light editing is fine: cropping, brightness, color. If the picture is a composite or made with AI, please say so. Those are not normally accepted as photographs.
• You need to be 13 or older. If you are younger, a parent can send your photo in.

We do not accept:

• Close-ups of strangers who can be recognized, especially children.
• Photos taken through windows or from private property.
• Readable license plates and house numbers. We can blur them for you.
• Photos that show where a private person lives.
• Accidents, injuries, crime scenes, or police and medical activity.
• Nudity, violence or hate.
• Advertising. Businesses can add a listing to the directory instead.

People and children

Crowds, events and people who happen to be in the picture are fine. If a person or a group is the subject of your photo, you confirm that you have their OK. For anyone under 18, a parent confirms it.

Children appear only in crowds, or when you are the child’s parent.

The gallery is editorial use. We do not use photos with identifiable people in ads, sponsor material, fundraising or a printed calendar without written permission.

Places

Photos inside the map’s area get a pin at the spot you chose. If you pick “general area”, the pin and the page show only that general area. We show the nests, dens and rare species of local wildlife as a general area only, never an exact spot. Photos from elsewhere in the county appear in the gallery without a pin.

No watermarks

Please send photos without watermarks, borders or text added to them. We show your credit next to the photo, so it is not needed on the picture.

What we do with your photo

You keep your copyright. By sending a photo you let BloomingtonOnline show it on this website, on the 3D map, and in our emails and social media posts, with your credit. A person looks at every photo before it goes up, and may blur a plate or a face, or ask you about it. If you choose not to publish your name, we credit the photo to “a Bloomington photographer” and your name is not shown anywhere on the site.

The photo’s own file carries a small note of its own: your credit if you chose to be named, the copyright notice, and the address of its page. Your camera’s embedded data (including any location it recorded) is not published.

Taking a photo down

You can ask us to remove your photo at any time, for any reason. When you ask, we take it off the gallery, its own page, the map, your contributor page and the home page at once. We also delete our own social media posts of it and stop using it in future emails.

We cannot recall emails that were already sent, or anything that was already printed.

To ask, use the link in your confirmation email (you can get a new one here), or report the photo. Every photo page has a “Report this photo” link too.

Your privacy

• Your email address is never published.
• To keep spam out, we check the name, email, caption and story with Akismet, and use Cloudflare Turnstile to make sure you are a person.
• We keep a scrambled version of your network address for 30 days to stop abuse, then delete it.
• If you tap a heart on a photo, a random id stays in your browser (no account, no name) so each browser counts once, and a scrambled version of your network address is kept for 2 days to stop abuse, then blanked. Hearts are anonymous.
• On the gallery and photo pages Cloudflare Turnstile loads in the background to tell people from bots when hearts are on.
• Your camera’s metadata is not published. The camera model is shown only if you tick the box to show it.

Copyright

If you believe a photo here is yours, or infringes your copyright, please report it and tell us which photo and why. We can take a photo down while we look into it. Reports about a person who appears in a photo are handled the same way.

Repeat infringers

If a contributor sends photos that turn out to belong to someone else more than once, we treat them as a repeat infringer. We remove their photos and stop accepting new ones from them.

Copyright agent

To send a formal copyright notice, contact our designated agent:

Our designated copyright agent will be listed here before launch.

To report a photo without a formal notice, use Report this photo. It reaches the same people.