Contribution terms

These terms are in force. Grants you make are recorded against the version shown above, so what you agreed to stays readable after the wording moves on.

Versions are written as major.minor. A grant you made under an earlier version stays exactly the grant you made — we do not retroactively reinterpret it. When the major number changes you will be asked to affirm the new version the next time you contribute; a minor change is a clarification and does not ask anything further of you.

Using the site at all is governed by the terms of use, which you accepted when you registered. They carry the age rule, the absence of any warranty, whose law applies, and how to reach us; those things are not repeated here. Everything below is about contributing.

What the site actually does today

This catalog is early, but everything these terms describe is built and running — there is nothing below that is a promise about a feature that does not exist yet.

Working today: browsing the catalog, submitting a swatch photograph one at a time, bulk intake for many photographs at once, curator review of everything submitted, and contributor credits on public pages.

Contributing is invite-only at the moment. Anyone can browse; uploading requires an invitation. These terms therefore govern a small number of people today, which is deliberate — the intent is to get the wording right while the stakes are low rather than after two hundred contributors have relied on it.

The short version

You keep the copyright in your photographs. You give this catalog permission to use them, and for some kinds of photograph you also give the public permission to use them under a Creative Commons licence. Facts — pile height, fibre content, a measured colour — are not copyrightable and are shared freely so the catalog is useful to everyone.

Everything below is the long version of those three sentences.

What you are affirming

Every upload records a permission basis: a short statement of where the photograph came from and what right you have to contribute it.

Both the one-at-a-time form and bulk intake ask you to choose one before you upload anything, and both offer the same two answers: that you took the photographs yourself, or that someone else took them and gave you permission to contribute them. Nothing is preselected, and no basis is ever assumed on your behalf — a basis we guessed at is worth nothing to anyone reviewing it later.

The two answers do not do the same thing. Photographs you took yourself are published under the open licence described below, so they can be reused by anyone who credits you. Photographs someone else took are held under the permission you were given: they are shown on this site and go no further, because permission to use a photograph is not permission to license it to the world.

When you affirm a grant, you are stating three things:

1. The photographs are yours to contribute — you took them, or you hold the rights to them, or you have the permission of whoever does.
2. Contributing them does not break a promise you made to someone else.
3. If a person is identifiable in them, you have that person's consent, and the authority to give it on their behalf if it is not your own likeness.

If any of those is not true for a particular file, do not include it. A photograph you are unsure about is worth less to the catalog than the trouble it causes.

Two kinds of photograph

Not everything you upload is treated the same way, because not everything you upload raises the same questions.

Openly licensed. Photographs of fabric taken for measurement — a swatch on a neutral field — are published under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0). Anyone may use them, including commercially, provided they credit you and share adaptations under the same licence. This is the material that makes the catalog worth something to people who never visit it.

Share-alike binds adaptations. Someone placing your unmodified photograph on a page alongside their own writing has made a collection, and their writing is unaffected. Someone recolouring or recompositing it has made an adaptation, and that adaptation must carry the same licence.

Restricted. Photographs of fur on a finished suit — anything depicting a character or a person — are never openly licensed. They are used only within this catalog, they are never sublicensed to anyone, and you can have them removed. This is not the project's material to open up, and we will not do it later either.

You make one affirmation covering the files in a submission. What it grants for any given file follows that file's role and basis. In practice this means the restrictive treatment applies automatically to the photographs that need it, without you having to notice.

Vendor photography is not yours to grant

If a photograph came from a vendor's website, catalogue, or listing, buying the fabric or visiting the page gave you no rights to the image. Do not contribute it.

There is deliberately no option to say otherwise. "Vendor-sourced" is not one of the bases you can choose, because a vendor's permission is not yours to assert — it has to be recorded with the vendor directly. Submitting a vendor's image under either of the available bases misstates your grant.

Vendor imagery reaches the catalog through a separate route, which records the vendor's own permission and what their terms were read to say. It is a curator's tool and not a contribution form, which is the point: the permission it records is the vendor's, so it is not something a contributor can supply.

This is the single most common way a community catalog acquires a legal problem it cannot untangle years later, which is why it is spelled out at this length.

Attribution

We do not ask for, want, or need your legal name. Pseudonymous contribution is the normal case here, not an exception we tolerate.

Your account settings carry a display name, which is what this site calls you, and a public attribution name, which is the credit that travels with an openly licensed photograph. Both are optional, neither has to be your legal name, and you can change either at any time. If you leave the attribution name blank we use your display name; if you leave both blank you are credited as "a contributor". Your email address is never shown publicly and is never used as a credit.

Public catalog pages show that credit beneath every photograph, and it is read from your account each time the page is drawn — so changing your attribution name changes the credit on everything you have ever contributed, not just on what you upload next.

The credit and the licence are also written into the image files themselves, as standard XMP tags, so that a photograph saved or re-posted somewhere else still carries the name it is meant to be credited under. Files already published keep the name they were made with until they are next regenerated.

What you can take back, and what you cannot

You can stop contributing at any moment and nothing bad happens.

For photographs you already contributed, an open licence you granted is irrevocable. This is not us being difficult: it is how CC BY-SA works, and it is the only way anyone downstream can rely on the catalog at all. A licence that evaporates is not a licence.

That said, irrevocability does not override:

• infringement, illegal content, or exposed personal information;
• consent that was never validly given, or has been withdrawn by the person depicted;
• obligations we owe you or others over personal data;
• the takedown and appeal process, which is published separately and applies regardless.

Restricted photographs remain fully removable at your request, always.

Measurements taken from your photographs

The catalog extracts facts from images: colour palettes, texture descriptors, lot profiles. Those are measurements, not copies, and they are not adaptations of your photograph. They can outlive the image they came from — if a photograph is unpublished or deleted, lawfully produced non-personal measurements taken from it may remain.

Measurements that are personal, or that were produced unlawfully, or that are tainted by whatever caused the removal, go when the image goes.

Deleting your account

You can close your account yourself, at any time, from your account settings. You do not need to ask anyone, and an open report does not hold you here.

What closing does depends on whether you have contributed to the catalog, and the screen tells you which before you confirm. If you have never contributed, your account and its data are deleted outright. If you have, your account is retired: your private and account data are removed and your public contributions are kept but attributed only to your pseudonym, so the catalog's shared history stays intact while your name comes off it. The revision history is genuinely unchangeable, which is why a contributor's account is kept as a pseudonymous tombstone rather than erased.

(This applies to administrators too. Nobody has to hand off first, and nobody has to find a successor before they can go — leaving is never made to depend on other people. If closing the last administrator's account leaves the site with none, an operator with server access restores the role from the command line.)

We want to be straightforward about a limit here rather than promise something we cannot do. Once a photograph has been published under CC BY-SA, copies may already exist elsewhere carrying your attribution name. We can change what this site shows. We cannot reach into copies other people already hold, and nobody who tells you otherwise is being honest with you.

If that matters to you, choose your attribution name accordingly before you contribute.