PSNZ Images on Flickr

The PSNZ Council approves the use of the Flickr Photo Sharing website to display images from PSNZ sponsored and associated events. The main reasons for this are:

• The membership are continually asking for images to be displayed on the web and a means of viewing earlier competition images.
• Our own website is nowhere large enough accommodate all these images.
• We need somewhere to archive competition images which is accessible so they can be viewed by the membership and other interested parties.
• Flickr is a website that is dedicated to image sharing and has the infrastructure to do this with minimal effort required to post images on the site. We would have reinvent the wheel to replicate Flickr’s abilities on our own site which is impractical in terms of time and resources.

While it seems to be an ideal solution there are some issues in using this service. They are

• The basic site is designed for photo sharing which is not we want to do. We only want users to be able to view the images, not download them. Some of our members sell their images, while others may not want them “pirated”.

  To combat this we have set the permissions for all PSNZ Flickr pages to “view only”. While to the casual user it appears they can still download an image, when they try to open it they will find a blank white page, no images.

• There are ways of bypassing this “view only” feature on Flickr.

  Our response to this is to resize all images uploaded to our Flickr pages with a resolution of 640 pixels on longest side at 72dpi. This resolution still presents an acceptable image to view. If these images are are somehow downloaded, then any enlargement will pixilate the image to make it unusable

• While the image title and author’s name is displayed, there is no direct access to the author of the image from the Flickr site.

  If a viewer wants to purchase or contact the author about an image, they have to contact the PSNZ Webmaster via a provided link making a request. The Webmaster will then pass on the request to the author so they may (or may choose not) to respond directly to the viewer. This way the author’s privacy is maintained by PSNZ and it is left to the author to contact the viewer so any further negotiations or sales can take place. Any sales are to be negotiated as a private matter between the viewer and the author.

• In future, all competitions run by or associated with PSNZ will have a notice stating our intention to display winning images on our Flickr pages. There may be those who do not want their images displayed.

  We will provide on all entry forms a tick box where the entrant can agree or refuse to allow their images to be displayed on our Flickr pages.