By accident I happened to notice a new detail on my Flickr account page last night, a sentence just below the top title: “Your account has been reviewed as safe by Flickr staff.” A link to a Flickr FAQ provides more information (more on FlickrBlog.) It turns out the reviewing is related to the NIPSA system and the system of “Safesearch” and content filtering Flickr has implemented to replace it. The stated intention of this system is to make sure images on Flickr are “suitable for a global, public audience”.
Now, being “reviewed as safe” sounds like good a good thing, so I thought I’d go one step further and mark all my non-photographic images as such. Flickr calls this “moderating your photostream”. One of the side effects seems to be that all my non-photographic images are no longer available in public searches. You can observe it by searching for the title "Randbox". It won’t show any results, meaning that my RandBox images are now NIPSA’ed. They can still be found via my photostream, but not through searching. Any non-photo images that were in Flickr's Explore are no longer there.
For artists and designers using Flickr to document and share their work, this development means that their non-photographic images are now second-class citizens. If Flickr goes any further in censoring non-photographic images, it would make Flickr unattractive for sharing anything beyond holiday snaps. I honestly don’t understand what they are hoping to gain by this strategy, as non-photographic images don’t present any problems unless there is a copyright violation. Nor do I understand why screenshots or CGI images would be unsuitable for a public audience.
If you have a Flickr account, you can see your review status for yourself. Individual users can set their “SafeSearch” setting to include non-photographic images, but by default it is set to exclude them. The setting is so obscure that I doubt any non-experts will ever see it.
you’re still #1 on google when searching for RandBox, but i still feel your pain. deviantart and cpluv.com are alternatives… but there’s something so disarming and inviting about flickr. thanks for the post.
woohoo!
d.
Hi Drew, thanks for the comment. It’s not the Google popularity contest that’s worrying me, it’s the fact that SafeSearch doesn’t seem to make much sense except for the banning of X-rated content. Surely they don’t really think that screenshots or CGI are that bad?
ComputerLove is an obvious alternative for designers, but not for visual artists. And I don’t really feel like a deviant, so deviantart.com is out.
Yeah, they’ve kind of messed it up again. In principle, they’ve actually weakened their stance against non-photographic images (it should be better that we can mark them as such rather than having our whole account declared NIPSA), but they’ve hidden the method for finding them so effectively that any gains are more than counteracted. I can sort of see how they want to be seen as basically a photo-sharing site, but it still seems self-defeating for them to ghettoise visual art to this extent…
Hey Marius, am not sure what’s different for me, but your images are the only ones which show up for the Randbox search example…
Also, there was post on the flickr blog (http://blog.flickr.com/flickrblog/2007/03/introducing_fil.html) back in March which suggested that NIPSA is history. If you still don’t see any non-photo images in your search results you maybe might just have to edit your search preferences? http://flickr.com/account/prefs/safesearch/
Hth! L8rs..
A little clarification…
It used to be alot worse on flickr. They used to somewhat have a “policy” against screenshots/art and other non-photographic content. And violating it too much could get your whole account NIPSA’d. In a recent update however they moved away from the “flag this photo” to a more granular system where you can specify what type of content it is: adult/screen/illus. etc etc.
You should do this as applicable, because the effect is that every user’s account settings determine what they wish to see now. You can adjust your own with the SafeSearch Filters.
Ultimately these photos are not publicly searchable to non-flickr users, who continue to see the safest photo only content per their business model (a photo sharing service). But you can otherwise share them with the public provided direct links to you and your stream.
As the previous poster (toxi) said, your illustrations show up just fine for me (logged in) because I’ve elected to see all content on flickr.
Toxi: SafeSearch can be turned off by users who are logged in, but by default the RandBox images won’t show up. I just tried it again with another Flickr account with consistent results.
I don’t understand the need to discriminate against screenshots or CGI, but even if I did I wonder why SafeSearch has been set up as such an obscure feature. The content type can only be set from inside Organize, which makes it unlikely people will bother unless their account is reviewed as “unsafe”. My account was reviewed as safe, so now I feel a bit stupid for having set the content type correctly.
I guess this is why you should never invest too much of your online life in any one service provider.
[...] Sadly, Flickr policy dictates that non-photographic images are not the focus of the service, with some resulting weirdness and frustration. But that still hasn’t stopped artists like Joshua Davis, Golan Levin and Lia from publishing excellent documentation of their work that is far more comprehensive than their personal web sites could ever be. [...]