What Airframe is
A place to put aviation photos. There is one rule, and this is the whole of it:
Is there an aircraft in it?
That's it. Blurry or sharp. A $6,000 lens at an airshow or a phone through a fence. Perfect light or flat grey cloud. Tilted horizon, soft focus, a wingtip clipped off the edge. None of it matters here.
Other sites reject photos for those things, and it puts people off taking part at all. Airframe deliberately doesn't. If you photographed an airplane and you'd like it up, it goes up. The detail is in What gets a photo accepted.
It's a logbook as much as a gallery
This is the half people don't expect, and for a lot of spotters it's the better half. Every photo you add is recorded: registration or military serial, type, operator, airport, date. Not as a caption, as an entry. So while you're sharing photos you're also building a searchable record of every aircraft you have ever pointed a camera at.
You can filter that record by tail number, type, operator, airport, country, date range or hashtag, and even ask it which of your photos are still missing a registration. It counts what you've seen, and keeps count separately of how many individual aircraft, types, airlines, airports and countries you've logged, along with how close you are to the next round number. The whole thing exports to a spreadsheet whenever you want it, so your own record is yours to keep rather than something trapped inside a website.
You don't have to publish a photo to log it. Tick just for my logbook when you add one and it's yours alone: recorded, counted in your totals, searchable by you, and invisible to everybody else. It isn't in the feed, in search or on your profile, and nobody can open it even with the address. There's nothing to review, because nobody else will see it. Publish it later if you change your mind, and it goes through review then.
There's a wishlist as well: the tail numbers you're still hoping to catch. Put one on the list, and when you eventually post a photo of it, Airframe spots the registration and ticks it off by itself.
What counts
- Anything with an aircraft in it. Airliners, light aircraft, warbirds, gliders, helicopters, balloons, military jets, airshow displays, cockpits, engines, cabins.
- On the ground or in the air. Parked, taxiing, taking off, on approach, in a hangar, in a museum, in pieces.
- Any camera. Phones are fine. Nobody is checking what you shot it on.
- Any age. Something from twenty years ago is as welcome as this morning.
- Airports themselves (towers, ramps, terminals), as long as there's aviation in the frame.
What doesn't
- Photos with no aviation in them. The sunset was lovely, but if there's no aircraft it isn't for here.
- Photos that aren't yours. Post your own work. Not something you found online, and not a friend's photo without asking.
- The same photo twice. An exact copy of something already published, or already waiting, is turned away automatically.
- Anything illegal, or a person photographed where they had good reason to expect privacy.
That's the entire list. There is no quality bar, and there never will be.
What happens after you add one
Every photo is looked at before it appears. Not judged, just checked against the one rule above, which takes about a second. Until then it sits in a queue, visible only to you.
You'll be told either way. If a photo isn't accepted you'll get a reason, and often a note explaining why. A photo that was turned away can be sent again up to 3 times. Useful if it was refused by mistake, or if you can crop it so the aircraft is actually in shot.
Your photos stay yours
You keep the copyright. Nothing you post here is sold, licensed to anyone else, or handed to another website.
By adding a photo you're allowing Airframe to show it on the site, and to use it in the site's own posts about itself: a photo of the day shared somewhere, that sort of thing. Nothing beyond that. Delete a photo and it's gone, including the original file.
A couple of things about privacy
- Location data is removed. Cameras and phones quietly record where a photo was taken. For a shot from your own garden that's your home address. The versions shown on the site carry no hidden data at all, and the archived original has its coordinates stripped out.
- Camera and lens details are kept, because they're interesting and harmless. You can turn that off per photo.
- Only you can download your original. Everyone else sees a smaller copy.
No comments
There's a like button and there's following. There is no comment box, on purpose. Comment sections are where photo communities usually go wrong, and nobody needs to be told their photo is soft.
Who runs it
Jack does. One person, reviewing everything by hand. If something's wrong with a photo, there's a Report link on it.