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11/30/2005: "When is a photo not a photo?"

Soundtrack: System of a Down - Hypnotise

Picked this one up from Meri, who linked to some bloke called Anders who made some rather good points about a bizarre Flickr policy.

Basically the summary of it is that Flickr is about *photo*sharing, and with this in mind whenever their staff come across a stream with non-photos in (drawings, artwork, doodles, etc, etc), the entire stream is marked as 'NIPSA', which means none of that users photos will show up in public areas or searches. If you want to know more, then you could wade through this lengthy forum conversation on the matter.

Now I've only just started using Flickr, and in fact at the moment 100% of my (one photo) stream is not entirely unmolested by photoshop. Is it still a photo? Where's the borderline?

But to be honest I don't care too much about how it may or may not affect me, and it's not going to modify how I use Flickr (when I find the time). I doubt I'd notice if I did get NIPSA'd. I just think it is quite sad that it's happening. I don't see how it can do Flickr any good to say 'here's this amazing tool, use it, create, enjoy' and so on, and then spoil the experience by applying rules based on a fairly fuzzy border.

It's a reasonable trend throughout product development that if you give something to a usergroup, they will find all sorts of uses you didn't think of in the first place. Most of the time this is a good thing - including this in my opinion.