Privacy

We welcome photographs of your litter pick for publication on our website. When you use one of our online forms to sign up for Spring Clean we ask you to confirm whether or not you agree that we may use your pictures for publication on our website and for other publicity material, and for us possibly to pass your photographs to the local press for OxClean publicity purposes. If you select ‘No’ on the form we will not use your pictures.

Please remember that under the latest legislation on data protection you need permission from everyone who is identifiably featured in a photo for us to be able to use it. Please ask everyone in a group photo if they consent to us using the picture. If anyone is unwilling, ask them to step aside so they are not in the picture. This need for consent only applies to people who are featured in your picture, not to any people who happen to be in the background. If you send us pictures we will assume that you have complied with these guidelines.

Special considerations apply to photographs showing identifiable children and young people. These need the consent of an appropriate adult for every child or young person up to the age of 18 – a parent, guardian or other carer. Most schools have specific safeguarding policies dealing with images of their young students – a teacher’s confirmation that sending us any photo complies with the school’s policy would be sufficient, but you need to check that the policy extends to publication of pictures by third parties (ourselves and possibly local newspapers) not just on the school’s website and social media.

Some people prefer to avoid this problem by only showing children’s backs, or blurring their faces. Generally, we would not use blurred-out photos on our website.

Again, if you send us pictures we will assume that you have complied with these guidelines.

One way of avoiding these issues is to get creative! While groups of smiling volunteers with piles of rubbish are very welcome and a good way of publicising your group and giving credit to their clean-up efforts, we are always on the look-out for odd, quirky or unusual litter-related photos. Different angles, odd or unusual finds, even a temporary art-work made out of the litter you’ve collected – all of these are good material.

Quality

The cameras on modern smart phones are excellent, and more than sufficient for our needs. Unless you are being creative with lighting or other special effects we will only publish photos that are sharp and bright. Please send photos in their original large size. They should be in jpg or png format and be bigger than an absolute minimum of 1200 pixels on the longest side, and preferably much larger!

Send your pictures by email to photos@oxclean.org.uk . Send them as attachments, not embedded in the text of the email as this drastically reduces the quality of the picture we can extract. Please do not send pictures in pdfs or Word documents. If you have several pictures to send and their total size is inconveniently large please email us at the same address and we will send you a link where you can upload them directly.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. We look forward to seeing your pictures!