FAQs

If you want to make your images available for other people to buy as prints or merchandise, or to be reviewed for commercial use by Mary Evans Picture Library, images will need to be a minimum of 24mb uncompressed. This means scanning the image so that the longest side of the picture is at least 3600 pixels long. You may have to increase the dpi on your scanner to achieve this. The final dpi does not matter as long as it generates a file with these dimensions. You should save all scanned files as RGB jpgs, and with as little compression as possible, so between level 10 and 12 ideally. Do not make images bigger in Photoshop or similar to bring them up to size. Their original scan must be this size. We do however encourage larger scans up to around 50mb which would be approximately 4800 pixels on the longest side.

If using a digital camera to copy an image, you should use a camera of at least 8 megapixels to make the copy, and the image should be full frame. An 8 megapixel camera generates a file size of approximately 24mb when set on maximum image size.

You should make sure that the image looks good enough so that if you received it as a print you would be happy with the quality. It should be cropped neatly so there is no border and be colour balanced or levelled properly.

You must first create an account and an album name. Once you are registered and login you will see a button marked "Add Photos" in the navigation bar on the left. Click this. You will then be taken to an interface that lets you select the folder on your computer where your photos are stored. Click on the folder or sub-directory and your images will be shown in the top box of the interface. Select the images you want to upload, and drag them into the bottom box. Then click upload. Remember to check the box "Share these photos" if you want other people to be able to see and buy these photos.

Once the upload is complete, you will be asked to add information and keywords to the images before they go online.

Keywording an image correctly is very important. If you do not keyword an image or add a description, it will not appear in any searches and will be lost. Also, you should not add keywords which are not relevant to the image as this will result in poor search results for users. It is your responsibility to get these right. See our keywording hints for more information, but a for basic guide use the following rules.

Title: This will default to the filename, but you can overtype this. The title shoule be a short summary of the image e.g. a person’s name or "Girl picking flowers".

Comments: This should be information directly related to the image and its background.

Date: This should be the date the image was taken, either exact or approximate. Exact dates should be in the format "1^st January 1915" otherwise "January 1915", "1920s" or similar.

Additional keywords: These should be words that don’t fit into a written description, but which are relevant to a search to bring up the image. Look at the image and think what words you might use to find it in a search, both from a general and specific point of view. For example, a picture of a boy with a dog is also a picture of a child with an animal, so child and animal are additional keywords. See keywording hints as well.

Anything legal that is your copyright, and evokes a sense of history or the past. No nudity or content which might not be suitable for minors. Today is tomorrow’s history, but if material uploaded is too recent, The History Album will lose that feeling of bringing the past to life. We would encourage people not to upload anything more recent than twenty-five years ago, and the older the better.

Copyright is the right to be identified as the creator of an artistic work, which includes a photograph. In general terms, whoever takes a photograph is the copyright holder. If your neighbour takes a photo and gives you a copy of it, he is still the copyright holder, not you, so you could not upload his photo here without his permission. If you do get permission to upload and sell pictures from friends and family, you should get that permission in writing just to be safe. Copyright lasts until 70 years after the death of the creator/photographer. So in 2008, a photograph shot by a photographer in 1937 will be out of copyright and safe to use. It is probably safest to add only pictures by you or family members who give you permission to do so.

You should see your images in your own album immediately. If you did not click "Share these photos", no one else will be able to see them online. If you meant to make them public, then you will need to edit the picture and change the preferences.

If you did choose to share them, before they are available to view by everyone, the images will be vetted for suitability for the site. This is a safeguard to protect minors, and also to pick up other issues such as copyright which might get contributors into trouble if they are not aware of them. Where an image is deemed unsuitable, it will be deleted automatically. If they are suitable for the site they will be made public during the next review process which rarely takes longer than a week.

You will only get paid if someone buys one of your images. Sales will be kept on your account until the amount due reaches £40 or more, at which point you will receive a cheque and statement of sales. This process is to avoid bank charges which will eat up most, if not all of smaller sales amounts.

The amount you get paid will depend on the size of print or product sold. You will however receive 30% of the sale price after material costs. The larger or more expensive the product, the more you will be paid.

As part of the content control process after you have uploaded images, your images will be reviewed for suitability for commercial use. If they are found to be suitable, then someone will be in touch to activate a commercial account. If you hear nothing within a week of upload, then you can assume that the images are not suitable for commercial use.