F.A.Q.

social shutter is a web application for you to upload your photos and quickly get to know what the world thinks about them. You can, of course, also rate the photos shared by the rest of the users.

- It has to be a photograph. Drawings, paintings or ads won’t be accepted.
- You have to be the author of the photo. We will not accept photos stolen from other people, under any circumstances.
- Please try to upload images that are above a certain quality threshold, and only those that were taken with an artistic purpose in mind. Please don’t upload that overexposed and blurry photo you accidentally took to your dog with your cameraphone (unless that was your purpose and it’s your way to express yourself, of course).
- Try not to upload a lot of variants of the same image. So, please don’t upload the same picture five times, each one with a different contrast or saturation setting.
- Please take 5 seconds to put the image in the right category when uploading. If you’re in doubt between many categories, pick any of them (for example, a black and white portrait could be in any of those two categories). You have no idea of how many pictures of flowers marked as “photojournalism” we have seen. =P
- Never upload offensive, inappropriate or illegal material.

No, the votes are absolutely anonymous. The author will only be able to see the number of positive and negative ratings, but he won’t see who casted them.

Yes, we believe a person has the right to rate his own work.

When you click on “follow this user” in a person’s profile, you start to follow his work. That means that you will always see the photos of that person first when voting. It’s a great way to keep track of the newest material by your favorite photographers.

Yes, it’s as easy as going to his profile page and clicking on “you’re following this user”.

Yes, you just have to go to “my pics”, click on the photo you want to delete and finally click on “delete photo”. Once you do this, no one will be able to rate it, see it in your profile or in the hall of fame.

Every day we pick the best rated photos that have been uploaded two days ago and we put them in the hall of fame. To choose which pictures go to that ranking we consider a lot of factors, not just the amount of positive and negative votes it got. Among them are the date the votes were casted and who rated the photo (the votes casted by the most experienced users have a greater impact, for example).

Badges are small awards you can receive while using social shutter. They try to reflect your behavior in the website... But they are also nice to show off in your profile. So, you can, for example, get a badge for uploading a lot of landscape photos, for rating a lot of photos in one day or for having a lot of followers.

Experience points are earned in a lot of ways. Among them are:
- Uploading photos.
- Voting photos uploaded by other people.
- Earning badges.
- Having photos in the hall of fame.
- Being followed.

If we see that you're giving many thumbs down to a particular person's photos, we're going to offer you the possibility of blocking that person. Once you do it, we're going to stop showing you the work of that person in the “vote” section.

No. Only you are able to see which persons you have decided to block. No one else will know, we promise.

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