Photo Policy
Last updated: August 2026
This policy covers the photos you upload to BoardMe: what stays yours, what you allow us to do with them, and what we do to protect the people and places they show. It forms part of our Terms of Service.
You keep ownership
You remain the copyright owner of every photo you upload. Uploading to BoardMe does not transfer copyright to us, and you stay free to use, publish or sell your photos anywhere else.
The licence you grant us
By uploading, you grant BoardMe a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, reproduce, resize, convert, watermark and publicly display your photos for the purpose of operating and promoting BoardMe — including in search results, on listing pages, and in the previews shown when a listing is shared. The licence lasts while the photo is on BoardMe and ends when you delete the photo or the listing, except for copies already cached or saved by other people, which we cannot recall.
Watermarking, and your moral rights
Every published photo is modified in exactly four ways: the BoardMe logo is added in one corner, the image is resized to three standard widths, it is converted to WebP format, and embedded metadata is removed. You consent to these four modifications and, so far as section 10(3) of the Intellectual Property Act No. 36 of 2003 allows, waive your moral right to object to them as a distortion or modification of your work. This waiver is limited to these four modifications, made for the purpose of publishing your listing on BoardMe. It does not extend to any other alteration of your photos, and every other moral right — including your right to be identified as the author — is unaffected.
Location data is removed
Phone cameras record GPS coordinates inside every photo they take. We strip those coordinates, along with all other embedded metadata, before publishing. This matters: without it, anyone who downloads a listing photo could read the exact location of a house that people live in. The picture itself can still give a location away, so avoid shots that show house numbers, name boards or street signs you would rather not publish.
People in your photos
Do not upload photos of current tenants, visitors or neighbours who have not agreed to appear, and do not photograph inside a neighbouring property. If someone identifiable appears in a photo you upload, you are confirming that you have their permission — and, where that person is a child, the permission of their parent or guardian.
Real photos of the real property
Photos must be of the property being listed and recent enough to show its current condition. Stock images, photos taken from other websites, architectural renders and photos of a different property are all grounds for rejection under "fake photos", and repeated use can get the account suspended.
Limits
Up to 8 photos per listing, each up to 5 MB, in JPEG, PNG or WebP format. A free owner account can hold 3 listings, so 24 photos in total. HEIC files from iPhones are not supported — on your phone go to Settings › Camera › Formats and choose "Most Compatible" before taking photos. Photos are compressed in your browser before upload, to save mobile data.
If someone uses your photo without permission
If a listing on BoardMe uses a photo you own, press Report on that listing, choose "Other", and tell us where the photo originally appeared. We remove infringing photos, and accounts that do it repeatedly are suspended. The BoardMe watermark exists partly for this: a photo taken from BoardMe and posted elsewhere can be traced back to the listing it came from.