This is the post where the licensing question stopped being theoretical.

In post #2 I wrote that giving up rights under CC0 felt strange. Uploading the first batch is where that becomes real, because the submission form doesn’t ask you to agree to something vague — it asks you to confirm that you’re releasing the work with no conditions attached. No attribution. Commercial use allowed. No takebacks.

I sat on that for longer than I expected to.

What resolved it for me was thinking about who actually uses these images. Someone building a site for a small conservation group. A teacher making slides. A student in another country who needs a photo of a species they’ll never see. None of them can afford stock licensing, and most of them wouldn’t know how to attribute correctly even if the license required it. The friction is the point of failure. CC0 removes the friction entirely.

The submission process

The rejections were more useful than the approvals. Two were turned down for image quality, the noisy handheld shots from the first morning, which I’d suspected. One was rejected because there was a man-made object visible in the frame that I hadn’t noticed. One I’m still not sure about.

That last one is worth dwelling on. When a human reviewer rejects your work and you don’t fully understand why, you have two options: assume they’re wrong, or assume there’s a standard you haven’t internalized yet. In an open project where the reviewer is a volunteer with more experience than you, the second assumption is usually the correct one.

What I’d tell someone submitting for the first time

Shoot with more margin than you think you need. Check the frame edges for anything artificial. And read the directory’s own guidelines properly before you upload rather than after — I did it in the wrong order and it cost me four photos.