VGGallery Guidelines

VGGallery is two things under one roof. The Campus wall is where a seated photo crew covers what happens at this school, and the Arts wall is where any Spartan puts up work they made. Both are full of pictures, and on the campus side most of those pictures are of people who did not post them and did not ask to be there. That is what makes this space different from anywhere else on the platform, and nearly every rule below comes back to it.

These rules are on top of the community guidelines, which apply everywhere on the platform. Read those first.

If you are in a photo and would rather not be

Open the photo and use the report control, then pick That’s me, please take it down. It is the first option on the list.

You do not have to explain, and nobody will ask you to. This is not a complaint you have to win, it is a request that gets acted on. A curator or an admin takes the photo down.

If you would rather not use the form, tell the yearbook adviser or any curator in person and they will file it for you. Either way it comes down.

Taking pictures of people

This section is for the crew, and for anyone photographing a person for the arts wall.

• Ask when the picture is of a person rather than of a moment. A wide shot of a packed gym is one thing. A close portrait of one student is another, and that one needs a yes.
• Check the photo opt-out list before you publish. The yearbook already keeps one, and it applies here too.
• No full names in a caption unless the person said yes. “Number 12 goes up for the block” is a caption. A name is a decision, and it is theirs to make.
• Nothing shot through a window, into a locker room or a bathroom, or anywhere a person would reasonably expect not to be photographed. There is no story that makes that fine.
• If someone asks you not to take their picture, do not take it. If they ask afterward, delete it. Neither of those is a negotiation.
• Do not post a photo of someone in a moment that embarrasses them: a fall, a bad play, a person crying. Ask whether you would want it on a school wall if it were you.

Whose photo it is

Post photographs you took. Every photo carries the name of whoever uploaded it, so a picture you lifted off someone’s account has your name under it, which is worse than not posting it.

Lifting a photo off the web, out of a group chat, or off another student’s page and putting it up as if it were yours gets it taken down. If a photo of yours ends up on the wall with someone else’s name on it, report it and say so.

The arts wall

The arts wall is yours. Any signed-in Spartan can put up drawings, paintings, digital work, photography, or a picture of something they built, with no seat on the crew and nobody’s permission.

• Post your own work. Reposting someone else’s art, with or without credit, is the one thing that gets a piece pulled fastest.
• If your piece is a photograph of a person, every rule in the two sections above applies to it.
• Work made with an AI tool is fine here if you say so in the caption. Passing it off as drawn or shot by hand is not.
• You pick whether each piece is school only or public, and you can change your mind later.

The arts wall is the only place in the gallery with comments, and they are moderated like everything else. Say something about the work. If you would not say it to the person’s face in the art room, do not type it here.

Campus photos have no comments

There is no comment box under a campus photo, and there is not going to be one. A photo of a classmate who did not post it is not a thread, and a comment box pointed at a person who never volunteered is a harassment surface with a nicer name.

You can still appreciate a photo. That control is on both walls. It is a count and nothing else, so it cannot be turned into a remark about anybody.

How a photo reaches a wall

On the campus side, a photographer uploads into an album and submits it, and a curator publishes it. Nothing a photographer uploads is public on their say-so alone.

Adding a photo to an album that is already published pulls that whole album back to pending, and a curator has to publish it again. That is on purpose. Without it, a photo could reach the wall without any curator ever having seen it.

On the arts side you publish your own piece. If the school turns review on, you submit instead and a curator publishes, and that is enforced by the platform rather than by hiding a button.

Either way the safety checks run before anything appears: on the picture, on its thumbnail, and on the words you wrote with it. A photo is on the wall only once a person published it and those checks cleared.

School only or public

Everything here starts school only, which means a reader has to sign in with a Vista Grande account to see it.

Public means anyone on the open web can see the photo, and search engines can find it and keep a copy. For a picture of an identifiable student that is a serious decision and it does not come back easily, so on the campus side only a curator can make one, and it is made for a whole album at a time. Every photo in an album follows the album.

On the arts wall you make that call yourself, one piece at a time.

When in doubt it stays school only.

What the platform does on its own

These are not promises about how careful people will be. They are things the code does whether anyone remembers them or not.

• Location data is removed from every photo. A phone writes the exact coordinates a picture was taken at into the file, along with a device serial and a hidden second copy of the image that survives a crop. All of it is stripped on the way in, before the photo is stored, on this platform and on every other upload on it.
• Nothing appears until it has been checked. Both the picture and its thumbnail are checked, because both are served on their own.
• There is no face tagging here, and there never will be. No name-to-face index of students exists on this platform, and building one is not on any roadmap.
• A take-down is a real deletion. The photo comes off the wall, and the file itself goes once the appeal window closes. The community guidelines explain the copy that is kept in the meantime and why.

How much you can upload

There are caps, and they exist so one enthusiastic afternoon does not spend a month of the platform’s budget. As it ships: 60 campus photos and 10 arts pieces per person per day, 300 photos in an album, and 4 MB per file.

An admin can change any of those without a deploy, so the numbers the uploader shows you are the real ones. Photos are also resized in your browser before they upload, so what gets stored is a display copy rather than the full camera file.

If something is wrong

Every photo and every album has a report control. Use it. A report goes to the curators and the admins, and it stays private from whoever posted the thing.

If a photo of yours is taken down and you think that was wrong, open a ticket at /support and a person reads it. The rest works the way it does everywhere on the platform: you can still see your own held work, and a person makes every call that removes something for good.

One thing that is worth saying plainly. If the choice is between leaving a photo of a student up and taking it down while someone looks, it comes down. Nobody is owed a photograph of somebody else.