The Simple Online Photographic dictionary is a personal pet project originally started as an illustrated dictionary on Giraffian. It was designed as a quick reference, born out of a frustration for finding what you want on Wikipedia without having to wade through very verbose pages, but with the alternative goal of being more informative than a plain text dictionary.

You can contact the site owner here.

Copyright

Text on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Almost all of the images on this site were sourced from flickr and were licensed under the Creative Commons-licensed content for commercial use, adaptation, modification or building upon at the time of sourcing. The balance of the images were either used with permission or were otherwise licensed to be used for derivative works at the time of sourcing.

No copyright infringement is intended by the use of any of the photos on this site. If you are the author of one of the photos, or the photo is of you, or you find an image offensive, or want any other modifications made like the image removed or the attribution changed, just add a comment on the entry or contact the site owner directly. Some images that appear to be otherwise uncredited are credited here.

However, you might be wondering why all the images are Creative Commons, Public Domain or used with permission, and the text of the site is copyright all rights reserved.

The answer is simple - this site took a long time to put together, finding all the photos and writing the text to go with them. Its not like it was generated with a dictionary parser and a Flickr-spidering bot, the entire site was painstakingly assembled by hand over several years. The copyright is simply protection from someone taking a screenscraper to the entire site and duplicating it verbatim. Think I'm paranoid? Of course I am - I've seen entire copies of Wikipedia duplicated on other websites.

If you are interested in using the images for anything, the derivative images on this site have been resized to very low resolution and are really only useful for other websites, it is always a good idea to go back to the original image. While all the Flickr images were creative commons for commercial use and adaptation when they were sourced, there is always the chance they have been changed or removed since they were used on this site.

Adding & Editing

You can sign in to add comments and add dictionary entries to the moderation queue. You cannot add or edit entries directly unless you have been explicitly made an editor of this site. If you can't access a word you want to edit (ie, it has a 403 message) just create a new entry for the same word.

The content on this site is tailored to appeal to a very wide audience, in particular children and people who speak English as a second language. As such, the language on this site tends to be very simple. This is the reason you cannot edit entries on this site directly, and why comments are moderated rather than appearing straight away. Helpful comments on dictionary entries will be taken into account, so don't be shy leaving corrections or extra information on any dictionary entry.

If you are a photographer and are looking for an excuse to take more photos, check out the Wish List. It has all the dictionary words that have photos that are just not quite right. If you have a photo that suits any word in the dictionary, whether CC licensed or commercially available on Getty images or a similar service (for $5 for under as unfortunately this site isn't an earner), please contact me with a link to your image.

Mobile

I don't own one of those modern newfangled mobile phones so it is very hard to make a mobile version of this site. If you want to help mobify the site, go to the m. subdomain of the site and let me know how well it works (or doesn't work) so I can eventually automatically redirect mobiles to the right place. Or better yet, if you have an older cast-off phone you're no longer using and you're feeling generous, you can always send it to me! Nothing beats a real phone in the hand when trying to make a mobile theme.

However, if you're one of those people wanting to make a mobile app of this site (there seems to be a lot of you) remember that not all of the images are cc-by-sa, and all of the text is cc-nc-by so you can make a free app but you can't make one you can sell if you are including the site text too.

Monetising

The Photographic Dictionary is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. The idea is for the site to raise enough money to pay its own hosting bill somehow, and links to topical books seems like a good idea. The site also has Google ads, and while I don't like them and they are largely unrelated to the content, they do contribute a few dollars to the hosting bill and I'm reluctant to remove them at this stage. This site runs to around 700,000 pageviews a month, so if you are interested in buying an ad that will replace the Google one for a period, please contact me with your proposal.

Privacy Policy

This site only collects information submitted when a user joins, which is username, IP and email address. This information is only used to verify an account on registration, and for subsequent system messages. Once you have an account the site will use cookies to save you from logging in every time you visit. Email addresses given through the sitewide contact forms are simply used to reply to messages, they are not collected and stored.

The Google ads use cookies of various kinds, which track your browsing habits but don't collect any personal information about you.

Additionally, by posting a message (including comments), you accept that your message and other personal details about you will be analyzed and stored for anti-spam and quality monitoring purposes, in accordance with Mollom's privacy policy.