Museums Policy

Museums Policy

TravelPhotoBase is a journalistic website which covers the world in images. Our objective is to capture a visual representation of what visitors will experience when visiting an attraction. Like a travel magazine, the site is designed to help tourists make the visit / no visit decision. We try to promote educational viewing of our photos. We strive to capture what our civilization looks like in the late 20th and early 21st Century, much like other photographers such as Mathew Brady, Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke White, Yousuf Karsh or William Notman have accomplished in the past.

We try to include all aspects of travel destinations in our coverage. This includes the interiors of museums which are often more revealing and intriguing than the buildings in which they are located.

Here is our policy when we do interior photography.
1. We do not use flash or tripods.
2. We do not photograph temporary exhibits.
3. We limit photos to works owned by the museum, if labels so indicate.
4. We avoid publishing any object still under copyright without copyright holder's permission. (Works not under copyright are any U.S. works created before 1923, or any U.S. work created before March 1, 1989 where the work was not marked with a copyright notice. Works created in other countries may have different copyright regulations.) We rely on museum labels beside works of art to inform us about copyrights, so if such data is not given, it is possible that we might make errors. Let us know.
5. We ask museums for permission.

Here is our policy regarding use of photos.
1. We do not license or sell photos taken inside museums. (We define inside as beyond the admissions desk.)
2. We do not license or sell any photos for any commercial purpose. (No posters, no postcards, no T-shirts, no coffee cups, etc.)
3. For photos taken in public places, we limit licensing to
a) Journalistic publications, broadcasts, or media.
b) Tourism & convention promotion
c) Educational endeavors such as textbooks
4. In all cases, except usages in students' term papers or teacher handouts, we require prior approval for any usage of photos on TravelPhotoBase.com.*

Here is our policy regarding service to readers.
1. We place no advertisements on the website and have no intention of ever doing so.
2. We do not require any login or cookies to view the website.
3. We strive for the highest quality of photos (now 98,300) and captions (now in excess of 1 million words or the equivalent in length to 1,400 newspaper articles.)
4. In captions, where possible, we give the name of the object pictured, the year the object was created, the artist, architect or creator of a work, style classification and general facts. We identify where the object can be seen.
5. We attempt to keep content in proportion to its relative importance or artistic merit in terms of the photography.
6. We try to give viewers the fastest possible downloads and displays.

For interior photography, we ask to be treated equally with other journalistic media. Note that many newspapers have commercial websites which license or sell their photos. If you would allow the local newspaper to photograph your location, then we ask that the same courtesy apply to our non-commercial form of journalism.

If you have any questions, please call Jim Steinhart at (416) 787-2138 (Eastern Time zone).

To see the credentials of Jim Steinhart click here.

(*NOTE: To maintain our non-commercial status, when we do grant a license, we donate the license to the applicant and do not charge or collect any fee. We used to post fees on our licensing page, as a method of protecting our images from theft. However, it confused some museums, so we no longer do. We reconfirm here that if anyone asks for an embargoed photo e.g. from inside a museum, they will be turned down.)