This site contains many thousands of images of Australian birds submitted by our members, in galleries of various types.  Most images are submitted to the New Images gallery, and subsequently transferred to the Main Library.  Images must show a clearly visible bird(s) that has(have) been identified by the photographer, and be of acceptable quality (reasonably sharp, well exposed, not obscured unless there is some artistic intent).  The bird(s) may occupy a significant part of the frame, but we also encourage shots where the bird is small in the frame such as habitat shots.   We also accept 'creative' shots which have been produced through in-camera or post processing treatments that move away from how the bird or scene may have actually looked in real life.  The creative keyword along with an explanatory comment should be used in such cases.  The species that we will accept are those on the BirdLife Working List of Australian birds, excluding those species whose Population is shown as 'Domestic'.  We will accept pictures of hybrid birds - see the note in the Species selection area of the Submit Photo page.  We will not accept images of unknown birds which are possible aviary escapees, or domestic birds, as we are unable to clearly identify these; they are not on the list of accepted species.  We will accept images of birds which occur in Australia but were taken overseas, with the proviso that, if there are subspecies, the image is of the subspecies which occurs in Australia.

For several years, images submitted to our competitions have not been allowed to have watermarks or borders/frames, in order to ensure anonymity until the competition voting is completed.  We have decided that we will extend this rule to images submitted to all galleries, to provide consistency of images across the site and to ensure that all images will be considered when people/organisations are requesting images for download - most of these requests are for conservation/education purposes and "plain" images are appropriate for this.  We will not accept images with watermarks and/or borders/frames in any of our galleries - with one exception: images submitted with the "creative" keyword selected may have a border/frame for creative effect.

All images submitted are assessed by a moderator before they are published (made visible on the website), and unacceptable images are immediately rejected; the moderator will include the reason for the rejection in an email to the photographer.  All other images are given a rating for both pose/composition/visual impact and technical; those which receive a "poor" rating will be automatically removed from the site after one month.  A document giving details of the image rating criteria used by our moderators is available here.

Images may also be submitted to our current Competition galleries, when a competition is open for entries.  Images which were rated as "poor" by the competition moderator(s) may be removed after the competition ends.  Galleries for the current year's competitions are retained for viewing; you can view those galleries via the Photo Gallery - Select Gallery to View page.   When those galleries are removed, the images which rated in either member voting or Mystery Reviewer critiques are transferred to the Main Library; other images from those competitions are removed.