Geograph Introductory letter

Dear New Member,

Thank you for joining Geograph. Welcome to our online community. Here are some explanatory notes to help you get the most out of our site.

The aims of Geograph

When the site was set up in 2005, the aim was ‘to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland.’ That’s still ongoing, and adventurous types may find remote squares in Scotland or Ireland, or intertidal zones around the coast, that are still available for ‘First Geographs’. The vast majority of images are ordinary photos from a camera or mobile phone. But we do now accept still images from drones, and panoramic views.

As the project has evolved into an educational charity with more than 8 million images, our aims have broadened to become the ‘go to’ place for good, precisely located and dated photographs of every aspect of the geography of these islands: geology, history, human use, weather patterns, changing landscapes, culture and community events … whatever you find interesting. We want schoolchildren, college students, PhD researchers and adult learners of all ages to benefit from what our contributors see around them.

We also seek to become a long term archive of change. Scanned historical images are as welcome as contemporary digital photos, provided you own the copyright (e.g. your grandparent’s old photos). Images of construction, demolition and temporary structures are a particularly valuable form of historical record.

To help us achieve all this, we ask all contributors to accept our Terms of Service and adopt this Creative Commons Licence for submissions. This helps ensure that we at Geograph can freely distribute the image, but also allows free use of images in the collection. For example, children can use them in their school reports. Please be aware that the version of the CC Licence we use does permit commercial use, for example in print publications for profit, or selling prints of your photos. All re-use is subject to you being credited by name. You can however choose only to release a low resolution version that is not much use for printing, if this bothers you.

How you can be involved

• Explore the options in the sidebar to see what the site contains. It’s much more than pretty pictures! ‘Search’, ‘Discussions’, ‘Browser’, ‘FAQ’ and ‘Sitemap’ are good places to start. Coming soon: the search will be revised to use AI to help identify similar images, as well as a text search.
• Submit your own photos, once you have got a feel for how the site works and the sort of images we are looking for. At present it’s easier to do this on a laptop or tablet than a smartphone, but we are hoping to develop a phone app in due course. Images are subject to moderation before going ‘live’, to ensure nothing wrong or inappropriate gets through. But this is normally done within a few hours. See links below for help with this.
• Discuss We have a very active member forum, using your chosen nickname, where you can ask any questions about how the site works, photography tips, or anything else relevant. You can quickly make online friends this way!
• Play Although Geograph has a serious purpose, we all like to have fun. So there are various games and competitions within the site, including the very popular ‘Photograph of the Week/Year’. All entirely optional, but you will find details of all these in the forum if you want to join in.
• Curate Every photo submitted has to have, as a minimum, a short title, an accurate location, date and a ‘geographical context’. We positively encourage submitters to provide informative descriptions with their images. Optional use of ‘tags’, ‘subjects’, ‘shared descriptions’, ‘grid square discussions’, ‘GeoTrips’, ‘blogs’ and ‘articles’ allow users to create collections of their own and other people’s images within the site to explore particular geographical areas or themes.
• Donate Use of the site is entirely free, and we want to keep it that way. Registered users won’t be shown adverts (casual users will), but if you become a regular, you may wish to support the charity financially.
• Meet We have an annual get-together for a couple of days in the summer so we can meet socially, explore an area together and hear relevant talks. Some members arrange local meets throughout the year as well. Many good friendships have been formed this way!
• Volunteer Once you have been a submitter and site user for a while, understand how it works and got to know some other members, you may wish to become one of our ‘volunteers’. These people moderate other people’s submissions, keep the discussion forum polite, suggest corrections where information is incorrect, represent the project to the outside world, or even become a charity trustee. Once you have submitted 100 photos you can opt to become a ‘company member’, able to vote at the annual meeting.

Explore Further

Rather than give too much technical detail here, these are links that will help you go deeper:

- Why Geograph? ‘The Geograph Manifesto’, a message from our founders
- Terms of Service – the legal agreement between our users and ourselves
- Submitting photos - what it’s all about!
- Geolocation – read this if you are not familiar with the ‘Ordnance Survey grid‘
- Reasons for rejection - follow this guidance to avoid disappointment
- Image types - our internal classification system
- Suggesting changes to keep the information accurate
- Collections to build an educational resource
- Contributor FAQ - common questions for new contributors
- Other documentation - a landing page for all other guidance documents
- Contact Us – if you have a complaint or a question that you can’t find answered elsewhere.

We hope that you enjoy participating in the Geograph Project. You are very welcome to explore the site and start submitting, and we look forward to getting to know you.

Regards,

Geograph Trustees, and everyone at Geograph

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