The Photographs We Cannot Publish

Every photograph on this site prints the photographer’s name and the licence beside it, which means a photograph nobody can be credited for is a photograph we cannot publish, whatever its licence tag says. That rule costs us pictures, and this post is about four houses where it cost us a specific one. It is the part of the work that never shows: a page with an illustrated façade on it looks like a page where nobody looked.

Ten of the 351 houses with a share card have no photograph we may use, so their card is drawn on an illustration we made ourselves. Every one of those ten was searched, and in most cases the file existed.

An archive that gave its pictures away and kept no name

Bern’s city archive has put a run of building-inspection prints on Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0, among them views of Gerechtigkeitsgasse 62, where the Klötzlikeller is reached down steps under the arcade. That is exactly the kind of release this site depends on: a public archive, an open licence, a street address in the file name, a date on the print.

We read the file pages again on 28 September. The print of 8 May 1949, captioned Klötzlikeller on its mount, gives its author as “unknown”, and so do two of the other three prints of this address. CC BY-SA requires attribution. The file asks us to credit somebody and then tells us there is nobody to credit, and a credit line reading “unknown” is not a credit — it is an admission that the chain has broken somewhere between the photographer and us.

As it happens the pictures would have failed anyway, which is why this case is worth reporting honestly rather than as a martyrdom: on the 1948 print a furniture dealer’s fascia, Möbelhandlung M. Spath, fills the arch and the cellar’s board is a smudge at the right; another frame is three arcade arches with no sign and no hatch; a fourth is the archive’s own catalogue card, mount and label included. The licence problem is simply the one that would still have bitten if the pictures had been perfect. The tavern leads instead with a 2023 photograph of its entrance under the arcade by a Commons contributor who signs as Ginkgo2g, credited on the page.

Two public-domain files, neither released by a photographer

The Ølhallen, in the cellar of the Mack brewery at Tromsø, is on Commons twice under a public-domain tag, and we refused both.

The first, File:Olhallen-Tromso.jpg, has a description in Norwegian that ends “Foto: Krister Brandser”. Its licence is recorded as a self-release by the uploader, KEBman, and Commons files it under “Assumed own work” and “Files with no machine-readable source”. So the page names one person as the photographer and takes the release from another. The second, of the microbrewery, was uploaded by an account called Olhallen1 — the pub’s own name — with the author field reading “Own work” and no person named at all.

Neither is a hard case legally: a public-domain dedication made by somebody who may not hold the rights is not a dedication, and in both files the person we would have to credit is either contradicted or absent. The house is illustrated here instead from two photographs that reached Commons from Flickr under CC BY 2.0 — the street front by a photographer who posts as scott1346, and the room with the stuffed polar bear in it by Bernt Rostad — both credited on the page and both listed in image credits. That is the pattern in most of these refusals: the licence is not the problem, the chain of custody is.

The 1989 frame, refused for its date and published for it

The one photograph on Commons that shows the Gleneagles Bar at Mġarr harbour plainly, with its name painted across the front above the luzzu boats, was taken by Gerd Eichmann on 19 May 1989 and released under CC BY-SA 4.0. The licence is clean. We refused it in September all the same, because at that point nothing on a pub page printed a photograph’s date, and a thirty-seven-year-old frame under a photographer’s name and a licence would have read as the bar this morning. A caption is not a decoration on an old photograph; it is the difference between a record and a misrepresentation.

Where a dated frame does belong is beside a photograph of the same view today, with the year printed under it, and twenty-five houses are shown that way on then and now — the earliest of them a view of the George Inn in Southwark from 1889.

Two technical notes from the Gozo file, because they explain why an automated photograph search misses buildings. It carries no coordinates at all, and its description and its categories name Għajnsielem, the local council, where our record for the bar says Mġarr, Gozo. A search by place cannot return it and a search by name only finds it if you already know the spelling on the file. We found it by reading the photographer’s own category by hand, which is how most of the good files on this site were found.

Writing this post also found a fault of ours, which is the sort of thing writing a post does. We checked what the site currently does with that frame, and it is approved in our data without the flag that marks a photograph as historic — so the bar’s page is showing a 1989 picture in the position reserved for a photograph of the house as it is, with no year anywhere near it. That is precisely the thing the September decision existed to prevent, and it is ours to fix rather than the file’s: the frame needs its date and its historic flag in the data, and then it is half of a pair. It has gone into the queue with this post, and when it is done it will be on corrections with the date.

The archive that asks first

The last of the four is the Central Hotel in Hobart. Commons holds nothing of it; the closest match is a government streetscape of about 1960 in a Tasmanian collection, in which the hotel is a minor element at the edge of the frame. Libraries Tasmania, which holds it, asks anyone wanting to publish a copy to ask permission first — a perfectly reasonable condition, and one this site cannot meet as a standing policy, because a permission granted to us by letter is not a licence a reader can verify from the page. So that house keeps its illustration until a photographer with a camera and a clear licence walks past it.

What this costs, and why we keep doing it

Photographs are the cheapest thing on the internet to take and the most expensive to be honest about. Thirty-seven images handed to this project in September were not used at all: their download records showed TripAdvisor, the pubs’ own websites, Booking.com, newspapers and Reddit, none of which gives anybody the right to republish. It would take an afternoon to fill every gap on this site with pictures like that, and about a week for somebody to notice.

We would rather have the illustration. If you have photographed one of the houses on the illustrated façade and you are willing to license it — CC BY or CC BY-SA, your name on the page — it is the most useful thing you can send us short of a deed.