Photo bundles and the profit sharing program

Personal study photos

Members with full subscriptions may upload 100 photos per tool for their own personal study. Since only you (and possibly site staff/moderators) will see these photos, they can be considered under "educational use." However, if you want to display or sell artwork you create based on photos you've uploaded, educational use no longer applies. Please make your own legal arrangements with any photographers' whose work you use.

All study photos, personal or public, must be legal for use and possession; absolutely no nude or sexualized photos of minors will be permitted on the site at any time.

The rest of these policies and guidelines discuss photo bundles submitted for public/other member purchase and/or use.

Public photo bundle basics

Members may create "photo bundles," batches of photos that are shared with the site at large for the purpose of studying. Members may offer these photos free of charge to our entire community, making the photos available to all members, even those on free plans. Or, they may choose to participate in our profit-sharing program.

Photos that are contributed to the site without charge give you, the creator, more control. You may request that your photo bundle be returned to draft mode at any time to add or remove more photos, and may even remove the entire photo bundle from the site. Once approved and published, your free photo bundles immediately become available to artists all over the world to practice with via our tools. Your contributions enrich the global artisitic community and support students in their learning endeavors.

Photos that are contributed as part of our profit sharing program may earn you some cash, but come with less control. Once you have made your first sale, that photo bundle and its associated images may not be removed from our collection.

Historically, all photos were donated to our tools, and we did not have the resources to offer anything in return. As the site has grown, we wanted to do something to give back to those who help us and the wider community by providing their photographs. We hope that this program makes it easier to contribute to our tools, and encourages more high quality photos be added to our library.

Creating photo bundles with photos to which you do not own the rights will result in an immediate forfeit of all payouts, and a lifetime ban from our photo bundle program. Trying to profit from photos you do not own is illegal, disrespectful, and can create legal and financial messes for Line of Action and jeapordize our community. You MUST be the photographer or model and have permission from all involved parties to upload photos to a photo bundle. DO NOT upload images you found via Google image search, Deviantart, or any other such service, EVEN if you are submitting a free-of-charge photo bundle.

Profit-sharing policies

Photo bundles must contain 20 or more images to qualify for being part of our profit sharing program. Free photo bundles can be added at any size, even just one image. Both free and for-profit photo bundles will always show your photographer's credit, as well as a link to your website if you wish.

  • Photo bundles of 20-39 images will be charged at $1.49, and the photographer will receive $0.50 per purchase.
  • Photo bundles of 40-59 images will be charged at $2.49, and the photographer will receive $1.00 per purchase
  • Photo bundles of 60-89 images will be charged at $3.49, and the photographer will receiver $1.50 per purchase.
  • Photo bundles of 90+ images will be charged at $4.49 and the photographer will receive $2.00 per purchase.

We have worked hard to try and make the profit sharing program as fair and transparent as possible. Here are our payout policies, and the reasons behind them:

  • We split direct sales of your photo bundle with you 50/50, minus the $0.49 at the end of the sale price. We typically never see the $0.49 ourselves, as it goes to credit card processing fees. Thus, (1.49 - .49) / 2 = .50
  • Payouts occur when your profits reach $25 or more, OR if you have $3 or more in waiting payouts that have for whatever reason not reached the $25 threshold after 6 months. This helps protect us both from the payment fees that take such a huge bite out of our microtransactions!
  • Payouts occur on the 15th and 30th of each month. This is so we can organize our schedules and have time to work on other aspects of Line of Action at other parts of the month.
  • We can only give payouts for direct purchases of the bundle that we made a profit on - that is to say, purchases that were not returned and refunded.
  • To ensure that a photo bundle isn't going to be returned, we can only give payouts for purchases that have stood for at least 14 days without being returned and refunded.
  • You are responsible for handling any taxes or fees you might owe on the amount we pay you, and for any income reporting requirements for your place of residence/business.
  • All payments are in USD.
  • For now, all payouts are made via Paypal.
  • We will make every effort to contact you should the paypal address you provide us turn out to not be valid, but if we don't hear from you for 6 months or more, your payouts that old or older may be forfeit. We are not a bank and are not equipped to pay taxes on money we have had to hold on to for you.

You may express a preference regarding whether you wish to eventually release your photo bundle to all members without charge, or keep it behind a pay wall. The typical period for releasing a photo bundle to all members is one year. Releasing your photo bundle to the entire community after a year can provide a great balance between personal reward for your hard work and altruism of assisting the global artistic community, regardless of their life circumstances or personal wealth. If you don't tell us otherwise, it is assumed that you will release the bundle to the whole community after one year.

Image submission guidelines

Permissions

  • You must possess the rights to all photos that you submit. If we find you have submitted images owned by someone else, such as images obtained via a Google Image search, you will be banned from creating photo bundles.
  • You must provide signed model-release forms to us for ALL models shown.
    • In the case of minors, the minor's parent or legal guardian will need to sign a release.
    • In the case of domestic animals such as pets, the animal's owner will need to sign a release.
    • Some exception may be made in the case of crowds in obviously public places, if the focus of the image is not on the people and instead on the environment they occupy.
  • By submitting your photos to us for inclusion in photo bundles, you are granting us non-exclusive use rights and reselling rights in the context of adding the photos to our study tools. These permissions will extend to other forms our service may take in future, for example the creation of an iPhone or Android app that mirrors or extends the services provided on our website.
  • You agree that with a for-profit bundle, after you make your first sale, you may not revoke these permissions.

If you do not have your own model release forms which allow you to assign use rights to another entity, you may use our template:

You should seek your own legal counsel before using these or any other forms. These are provided for convenience, not as legal advice.

Content

  • Non-sexual nudity is allowed for models 18+. We do not accept nude photography of minors, no matter how innocent or artistic the pose.
  • Overly provocative poses may also be rejected, as this puts the focus on the nudity being titular rather than academic. Although there's nothing wrong with human sexuality, consent is also important, and people studying nude anatomy are not necessarily consenting to seeing sexually forward images. In general, we've also found our students are not interested in glamour shots, and prefer to see "real" bodies in real poses.
  • If you are submitting to our figure study or animal tools, the subject must not be arbitrarily cropped or cut off -- the subject's full body, including extremities, should be visible, unless covered by some prop or hidden through foreshortening.
  • We strongly prefer color photos, and may reject bundles that consist of black and white photography.
  • We strongly discourage manipulating photos in ways that decrease their usefulness for the studying of their subject, ie, anatomy, and may reject photos where the contrast is too high or too low, the colors have been changed or strangely lit to look unnatural, etc.

Quality

  • Minimum width of 2000 pixels for horizontal photos, or minimum height of 1600 pixels for vertical photos. Larger is permitted.
  • We prefer a DPI of 72 - 144. We will accept up to 300 DPI.
  • Images must not be blurry.
  • The images must be well-lit enough to allow for learning something about anatomy (or environments, if for the environment tool.)

Process for submitting photo bundles

Regardless of whether you choose to release your photo bundle free of charge to the entire community or to participate in our profit-sharing program, all photo bundles will go through the same creation and approval process.

Draft

Upon creation, your photo bundle will begin in the "draft" phase. During this time you may change the name, description, and settings of the bundle as many times as you like. You may associate your photographer's credit with the bundle. You may also upload up to 200 photos to be part of the bundle. You may remove or add photos at will, and edit the tags associated with those photos. Accurate tagging can increase the usefulness and popularity of your bundle.

Once chosen, you cannot change which of the study tools your bundle is intended for. If you made a mistake when creating your bundle, you'll have to delete your bundle and start over. Luckily, it's hard to do very much to your bundle without noticing this error, so usually very little work is lost.

When all the basic requirements have been met, including uploading photographer and model release forms, you may submit your photo bundle for staff review whenever you're ready.

Once the bundle leaves draft mode, you will not be able to edit it any longer. However, a comment stream will appear on your bundle after you submit it for review, enabling you to chat with our staff about your bundle when needed.

Staff review

We will review submitted photo bundles for quality, content, and accurate tagging. We will also perform a reverse image search on a representative sample of your photos; if we find that these photos have been taken from elsewhere, further steps will be taken to ensure that you are the true owner of the images. For example, if the images appear to be from a specific Deviantart account, we will message that Deviantart account to see whether the photos were intentionally submitted or were stolen.

If there is still significant work needed on a photo bundle at the time that you submit it for review, we may return the bundle to draft stage with a description of what you need to do to resubmit for approval. We may also ask you some questions about your bundle. Back and forth chatter between you and our staff as a bundle is reviewed and prepped is not uncommon.

Our staff may choose to remove images from your bundle, change the tags associated with individual images, revise the name and description of the bundle, and generally do what it takes to prep the bundle for release. You will be notified of any changes and the reasons for them.

Pending publication

When approved, some photo bundles will skip this stage and be published immediately. Others may spend a few weeks in the pending stage - this is to help stagger the release of bundles to keep your bundle from getting buried under other new arrivals to our library, and to help us coordinate any potential publicity for your bundle (such as news posts, newsletter inclusion, or announcements on our facebook page). Publicity from us is not guaranteed, but we do our best to spotlight when we can!

You'll know the scheduled date of publication while your bundle is pending. You can give us your opinion on when you'd prefer your bundle be published, and we'll take that into account and do our best to honor your wishes. However, the final call about publication date is with our staff.

Published

At this point, your bundle is available for use/purchase! It is very rare that we will make further edits to your bundle at this point; the only exception being occasional addition of tags to photos, should new relevant tags become available.

Submit a usage complaint

If you find that someone else has submitted your photos to the site without your permission and we failed to detect that during our quality control, please contact us immediately with details.

Still have questions?

Please contact us with any other questions you have about creating, sharing or selling photo bundles.

Last updated June 1st 2021 - Added payouts after 6 months, even if you haven't met the normal minimum payout threshold. Removed some requirements about releasing photos to full members after a certain time period.