This is a photo-hosting site - for photos - your sort aren't welcome here.

Boing-boing article: Drawings banned from Flickr's 700hoboes tag.

Monkstyle's blog post on the issue.

Flickr forums on the issue: One. Two. Three.

Because from time to time I post up one of my drawings /doodles /illustrations to my photostream and I know a few of my flickr mates do the same - I have concerns about this issue. Is there going to be a time where I post just the one illustration too many for the flickr police and I'll get everything I've done instantly pulled out of the public areas - the tag searches, the 'explore interestingness' areas -etc.

I'm afraid it's these sort of petty and arbitrary distinctions* that are beginning to sour flickr for me. I can see the first hairline cracks are beginning to show in the slow creeping yahoo-ization of Flickr.

Can no one there see just how insulting it is for an artist to be lumped in with the porn and other 'undesirable stuff'.

It’s as if flickr is saying in no uncertain terms: “Dirty, dirty drawings -ew! non photos - dirty, dirty illustrations. Ew - filthy - not fit to be seen by the public. Must be hidden away. Must be made hard to find.” It is essentially relegating a small number of users into second class flickrites. Surely that isn’t fair?

I have to ask: is flickr so desperately scared that people doing a tag search for a subject aren't going to be able to distinguish between a photo and a drawing from the thumbnail alone, and to make the choice for themselves whether they want to look at that picture? So scared that Flickr has taken it upon themselves to make that choice for the casual viewer?

Are they living in fear that overnight absolutely everyone is going to start posting huge slews of non-photographs that are going to swamp out the photos completely? Because let me put their minds at rest right now -that is never going to happen. The drawings/illustration work has always been a very small percentage of what is on flickr -it is ever likely to remain so.

If drawings are so hideously offensive -why is it one of the flickr founders set up a whole group devoted to doodles? Why did the flickr blog dedicate one of it’s posts to handwritten notebook blogs -(some which had -gasp! drawings in them)?

I’m bemused that they should decide to make this an issue when surely there are far more pressing things they should be concentrating on. Like for instance -getting that reset button back - so I know when NEW really means new, etc.

There wasn’t anything broken here that needed this sort of fixing. If they had any sense they’d go back to just letting the drawings/illustrations/whatever back in the public areas and stop making themselves look so woefully petulant. It would save them so much grief.

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*I say arbitrary because as yet no one can say exactly what a photo is. If they going to get only what they’ve decided they want -they’re really going to have to start getting pedantic to the point of ridiculousness. Instead of just ‘photo’ they’ll have to say ‘pictures only ever taken with a camera - a scanned photo print (originally taken with a camera) is alright but only just - but absolutely and totally no scanned drawings - and no photos of drawings or paintings - except graffiti because we like graffiti - and no photos that have been so overly manipulated in a graphics program that they’re unrecognisable…. (and on and on…)