It would be glorious of you to add your vote to the DIGG story about this topic.

Thanks!

Blue skies
love
Roy

“I emailed flicker about why my photos were not showing up on searches and this is the reply I got. I think we should go elsewhere as they obviously do not want us here. Anyone got any ideas”

Hello,

Thanks for your question.

Our Community Guidelines state that non-photographic
images such as screen shots, paintings, drawings,
illustrations, graphic designs, scanned images, or digital
art are not allowed in public areas of the site. You may
still see some, but these types of images are generally
blocked from appearing in searches or the Explore pages.

Regards,

Monish

I’m somewhat torn, I can see what flickr was trying to avoid with this strategy, they didn’t want to become and “imageshack” or “photobucket” where all the accounts are full of crappy images that most people grab off joke web sites. IMHO I enjoy seeing original artwork in the mix, and it is clearly a huge community of people on flickr who are contributing to flickr as a vibrant community.

I think Phil’s points about notification and guidlines is important. They should have some kind of notification of being deemed NIPSA, as opposed to this stealth approach they are using. Providing guidlines for how to bring your account back from being NIPSA is important as well.

Thanks for the kind things you said about my photostream. I’m just glad that you’ve managed to see it at all! I think what Flickr is doing is outrageous! Isn’t photography an art form? What if you want to take an interesting photograph of a sculpture? Where do you draw the line (not that they like line drawings of course!) and why should there be a distinction?
It seems totally closed minded to me. I used to get very positive comments from people who had searched for elephants for example, found my painting and enjoyed it. Why should people only be able to find photographs and not every image on the subject they are interested in? Some people are not as closed minded as Flickr seems to be and if they don’t like something they can just keep going. Art seems to be treated like offensive porn or something! I wonder what the policy on that is?

The strange thing about the NIPSA issue is that there is no way of actually TELLING if your account has been marked NIPSA by them.

You kinda get a feeling at some point when you notice that your pics aren’t being viewed quite as much as they used to.

And then you do a tag search, using one of the unique tags in one of your pics. And, lo and behold, nothing shows up. You simply don’t exist.

Every single pic of mine has a ‘royblumenthal’ tag. If you search the tags for ‘royblumenthal’, you will not find me. You won’t even see my profile.

I agree with Bree about it being a space for photos. And it really is constituted as such.

What I object to is this:

1. I’ve ALWAYS only had my artworks in my photostream.

2. I was marked NIPSA only recently, after about a year or two of being on Flickr, and around 6 months into my paid pro membership.

3. They didn’t tell me about it.

4. You have to search quite carefully through their smallprint to find that drawings are not welcome.

5. I’m invisible now to the Flickr community, aside from people who happen upon some of my stuff in groups I belong to.

6. If they didn’t allow drawings and artworks, they should EXPRESSLY FORBID IT, and make your NIPSA marking VISIBLE to you, and REVERSIBLE if you follow certain guidelines.

7. There are hundreds of thousands of artworks on Flickr. And many hundreds of groups dedicated specifically and solely to artworks. They’re pissing off a LOT of people. And that kind of pissed-off-ness leads to a groundswell of public opinion against them sooner or later.

Good on you for the blog post.

Blue skies
love
Roy

It would be nice if they would create a category of search for artwork, however, so that artists could still use the service to store photographs or slides of their work.

An alternative might be to use a tag-based sorting as you’ve suggested above, only pick a tag cluster of more specific, generic terms such as ‘painting, artwork, art’ etc. That way you wouldn’t have to be in on the meme to send your artwork to a publicly visible place.

There could also be an exception made for groups that are specifically art-focused. There are several currently on Flickr. Allowing photo representations of artwork in those areas alone would be adequate, I think.

I also have some images of my artwork on the site, though they’re far outnumbered by photographs. It’s nice to be able to expose both forms of art to a wider audience.