# AIS Fleet vessel photos

The member-built AIS Fleet photo catalog: how photos appear on a vessel, how to contribute your own, what happens at review, and what publishing one gives away.

Every vessel on AIS Fleet can carry photographs, and members are the people who take them. The catalog is shared: a photo you add to a vessel is the photo everyone else sees on her.

## Photos on a vessel

Open a vessel and her photos are on her panel. They open full screen, and the count sits on the cover so you know how many there are before you tap.

Two different things can appear there, and it is worth knowing which is which:

- **Catalog photos** are contributed by members, reviewed before they appear, and published with a small Saillogger mark drawn into the picture, and the photographer's credit beside it when one was given.
- **An owner's own photo of their boat**, published through their Saillogger profile, belongs to them. It is not moderated here and it carries no mark.

## Contribute a photo

Open a vessel on the map and choose **Add photo**, or start from the **Photos** tab, which also lists everything you have contributed. The **Photos** tab route asks for her nine-digit MMSI, so the map route is the easier one when you know her by name.

She has to be a vessel AIS Fleet has already heard, the same ones you can follow. JPG, PNG, GIF and HEIC files are accepted, up to 20 MB.

The **photo credit** box is yours, and what you type is remembered for the next upload. Your credit is not a caption bolted on beside the picture: it is drawn into the image itself, under the Saillogger mark, so it travels with the copies AIS Fleet serves. Leave the box blank and the photo publishes uncredited, and note that a very small rendering carries the mark alone, because the credit line would be too small to read. The contribution agreement is the exact promise here, and it does not guarantee credit in every place a photo is used.

**Every submission is reviewed before it appears.** While it waits, you see your own photo on the vessel marked **Awaiting review**, and nobody else does. We e-mail you either way. If we cannot publish it, the note says why, the file is deleted, and the e-mail brings you back to the uploader for that vessel so you can send another.

You can delete your own photos, published or waiting, from the **Photos** tab.

> [!IMPORTANT]
> **You keep your copyright.** Accepting a photo into the catalog gives Saillogger LLC lasting permission to use it, and that permission reaches further than the vessel's own page. You can withdraw a photo while it is still waiting for review. Once it is published, deleting it later does not end the permission. Please read the [AIS Vessel Photo Contribution Agreement](https://aisfleet.com/vessel-photo-contribution-agreement/) before your first upload: it is short, it sets out exactly what the permission covers, and it is the actual agreement rather than this summary of it.

### The location saved in your photo

Photos often store the exact spot and time they were taken. **Include the location saved in this photo** is ticked by default at upload. Untick it and that location stays out of the catalog and the public display.

The original file on your phone or camera still carries it either way, so if you would rather it was never stored at all, strip the metadata before you upload.

## Planning a shot

Nothing on AIS Fleet is built as a shot planner, but most of what you need is already on the screen:

- **Search results carry a distance and a direction** from your own boat, when one is linked and reporting, or otherwise from the middle of the map you are looking at.
- **Her panel carries her speed, her course and when she was last heard.** A destination line appears on the boats that report their own details through Saillogger, which is a minority of the traffic.
- **24h track** shows where she has actually been over the last day, which is a useful reference for how she moves in your water. It is a record and not a forecast: a day's trace may hold no approach at all, and a vessel is free to take a different line, or none.
- **The departure e-mail is the real warning.** Follow her, and you are told when she gets under way rather than having to notice it.

What does not exist, so you do not go looking for it: there is no ETA, no alert when a vessel comes within a distance of you, and no way to be told about a vessel you have not followed. Following her is what turns her into a notification.

> [!NEXT]
> Linking your own boat, fleets and messaging other members: [Your boat, fleets and messages](https://saillogger.com/docs/your-boat-on-ais-fleet.md).