Acceptable Use Policy

It applies to you as a studio, to everyone you add to your account, and to anyone you give access to a gallery or a client portal. You are responsible for what the people you invite do with that access — not because we want to be strict about it, but because we have no relationship with your clients and cannot police them for you.

Content. Do not upload, store or deliver through the platform:

• content that sexually exploits a minor, in any form. This is the one item on this page with no discretion attached to it — see below;
• intimate images of a person shared without their consent, or content produced to harass, threaten or defame someone;
• photographs or other material you do not hold the rights to license to us for hosting;
• photographs of people whose faces you intend to scan without having the permission our Terms §7a and our Biometric Policy require;
• malware, or anything designed to damage a recipient’s system.

The platform itself. Do not:

• try to reach an account, organisation, gallery or portal that isn’t yours — including by guessing gallery PINs or portal links;
• probe, scan or test our security, or that of our providers, except under the research terms below;
• extract data in bulk by automated means, scrape the application, or build a competing product from what you obtain by using it;
• resell, sublicense or rent your access, or operate the platform as a service for studios who are not your own business;
• deliberately overload the service. Several public endpoints — gallery PIN entry, booking, mailing-list signup — are rate limited, and circumventing those limits is a breach of this policy rather than a puzzle.

Messages sent through us. Email and SMS you send from the platform go out through our providers, under our sending reputation. So:

• only message people who have a relationship with your studio, or who asked you to;
• honour unsubscribes and STOP replies, and never remove or disguise them;
• follow the rules that apply to you — in the United States, CAN-SPAM for email and the TCPA for text messages; elsewhere, whatever is equivalent.

Bulk unsolicited sending is the fastest way to get a sending domain blacklisted, and the damage lands on every other studio on the platform. We act on this one quickly.

If we become aware of apparent child sexual abuse material on the platform, United States federal law (18 U.S.C. §2258A) requires us to report it to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and to preserve the material for the authorities. We will do both, and the account will be terminated immediately and permanently. There is no appeal, no notice period and no refund.

The same law is explicit that it creates no duty to monitor, and we do not — see the next section. Our obligation, and what we will do, is triggered by finding out.

We do not proactively review, scan or moderate the photographs you upload. There is no content-moderation system in the product, automated or otherwise, and we are not going to claim one. Your galleries are private client work and we treat them that way.

Two consequences worth being clear about. First, nothing here should be read as us having approved your content — we have almost certainly never seen it. Second, we act on this policy when something is reported to us or when we come across it while supporting you, and not before.

The one automated system that looks at photographs is face grouping, which is off by default, does what our Biometric Policy describes, and is not a moderation tool.

Email hello@thephotographersframer.com with a link or enough detail to find what you are reporting, and what is wrong with it. You do not need to be a customer to report something, and you do not need to use any particular form of words.

For anything involving a person’s immediate safety, contact your local emergency services first. We are a small company and we are not a rapid-response service.

We have a designated agent registered with the United States Copyright Office to receive notices of claimed copyright infringement, as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires.

A notice must include all of the following, or we may not be able to act on it: identification of the copyrighted work you own; identification of the material you say infringes it, with enough detail for us to find it; your name, address, telephone number and email address; a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised by the owner, its agent or the law; a statement that the information in the notice is accurate and — under penalty of perjury — that you are the owner or authorised to act on the owner’s behalf; and your physical or electronic signature.

We will remove or disable access to the material, tell the studio it came from, and give them the chance to send a counter-notice. If they do, we will forward it to you, and unless you tell us within ten business days that you have filed a court action, we may restore the material. Accounts that repeatedly infringe are terminated.

Section 512(f) makes knowingly misrepresenting that material is infringing actionable. Please be sure before you send a notice.

If you find a vulnerability, we would much rather hear from you than read about it. Email hello@thephotographersframer.com with enough detail to reproduce it.

We will not pursue legal action against you for research conducted in good faith under these conditions: use only accounts and data that are yours or that you have been given permission to test; do not access, modify, delete or retain anyone else’s data, and stop as soon as you have confirmed access is possible; do not degrade the service for others; and give us a reasonable chance to fix it before you publish.

We will acknowledge within two business days and tell you what we are doing. We do not currently pay bounties; we will credit you if you want to be credited.

A person reads every report and decides what to do. There is no automated takedown, so what happens depends on what actually happened rather than on what a classifier thought:

• Usually — we contact you, explain what we have seen and ask you to fix it. Most breaches of a policy like this one are accidents, and that is where they end.
• If it is ongoing or serious — we may suspend a specific capability, such as sending, or suspend the account, while we work it out with you.
• Immediately, without notice — for material involving minors, for an active attack on the platform or another studio’s data, or where the law requires it.

If we suspend or terminate your account, we will tell you why and, in any case other than the ones in the last bullet, give you a reasonable opportunity to export your work. If you think we got it wrong, reply and say so — a person will read that too.

We will date any change here. If a change narrows what is permitted in a way that affects how you already use the platform, we will email active studios before it takes effect.