Real photos, but only of planes you actually caught
Every aircraft you catch gets a page. Until today that page could show a catalogue photo of the type — a stock picture of a serial machine — but never the aircraft as you actually saw it. Now it can: you can attach your own photograph to an airframe in your collection, and it appears on that aircraft's page for everyone.
There is one condition, and it is deliberately narrow. You can only add a photo to an aircraft you have caught with it genuinely overhead you. Not one you caught in the simulator sky from the other side of the planet — one where your real position was under the real aircraft when you claimed it. We already record that: a scan is anchored to your actual location, so a scan catch qualifies by construction, and a catch from the simulator qualifies only if your browser also gave a real position at the time.
Why not just let anyone upload anything
Because that site already exists, several times over, and it is not better for having one more. The large aviation photo archives hold millions of images between them and have done for two decades; a new empty gallery helps nobody. What none of them can do is prove that the person behind the camera was actually there. We can, because we run the tracking data the catch is built on. So the thing we are adding is not storage — it is a photograph welded to a verified sighting.
The narrowness has a second effect, which is that it removes most of the incentive to post someone else's work. To upload a stolen picture of a rare airframe you would first have to have stood under that exact aircraft yourself. It is not impossible, and we still check for it, but the pool of worthwhile targets collapses to almost nothing.
What happens after you press upload
Your photo is held, briefly, and looked at automatically before it goes public. The check asks simple questions: is this actually an aircraft, is it a photograph rather than a simulator render, does it carry someone else's watermark, is it something nobody should be shown.
Two things about that are worth stating plainly. The automatic check can hold a photo, but it cannot delete one. Deleting is a human decision. A held photo is invisible to everyone but you, so nothing harmful sits in public while it waits, and a mistaken hold costs you a delay rather than your shot.
And you always get told why. If your photo is held, the notification says which rule caught it, in your language. Anyone who has uploaded to the older archives knows the alternative: a rejection with no reason, and an appeal that comes back undelivered. We are not rebuilding that.
One nicety: if the check thinks you have uploaded a screenshot from the simulator, it does not treat that as an offence. Simulator shots have a home here already — publish it as a Moment instead.
What is not here yet
Reading the registration off the photo and comparing it to the aircraft you claimed is the obvious next check, and it is coming. It needs care rather than speed: a tail number that is too far away to read is not the same thing as a tail number that does not match, and confusing the two would punish exactly the long-lens shots that are usually the best ones on the wall.