Airliners.net: history, upload criteria and screening explained

For many spotters, Airliners.net is where the hobby started online: looking up registrations, marveling at old liveries, arguing about fleet plans in the forum. If you submit photos yourself today, you quickly notice that the site applies strict standards. This guide explains how Airliners.net came about, how screening works and what to pay attention to in the upload criteria so that your images pass the review.

Airliners.net in one sentence

Airliners.net is a volunteer-curated photo database for aircraft with an attached aviation forum. Every image is reviewed before publication, tagged by registration, type, airline and location, and is then searchable by everyone. That makes the site reference work, archive and quality benchmark at once – and, for many photographers, the confirmation that an image is “good enough”.

The history: from dorm room to database

A student project from Sweden

It began with a single photographer. Johan Lundgren Jr., a computer science student at Luleå University of Technology in northern Sweden, put his own pictures of modern airliners online in 1996 – under the plain title “Pictures of Modern Airliners”. According to English Wikipedia, he kept working on the site even during his military service. In 1997 the project got the name Airliners.net, and other photographers began contributing their images.

The technology was down to earth at first: The first web server stood in Lundgren’s dorm room, later more machines were added, and they eventually moved into university rooms. For the time, the concept was new. Until then, spotters swapped slides and prints by mail or at meetups; a worldwide searchable image collection did not exist. How much such portals changed the hobby is described in the overview of the history of plane spotting.

Growth and sale to Demand Media

With success, the workload grew. In July 2007, the sale to the US company Demand Media of Santa Monica became known; Wikipedia gives a purchase price of 8.2 million US dollars. As the reason, Lundgren said he could hardly handle the rapid growth on his own anymore – the site was running on around 25 servers at the time. The move drew criticism in the community because many feared commercialization. Demand Media later operated as Leaf Group.

For a time the family also included the sister site MyAviation.net, which accepted photos far more generously than the strict main portal. It was shut down in December 2014.

Relaunch in 2016 and VerticalScope

On June 14, 2016, a completely overhauled version of the site went online. At that point, according to Wikipedia, the database held more than 2.7 million photos. In February 2017, the Canadian online media company VerticalScope took over the platform, to which it still belongs today. German-language Wikipedia cites more than three million entries for 2019 – besides aircraft also helicopters, other aircraft and subjects around airports.

Year	Event
1996	Johan Lundgren Jr. publishes his own photos as “Pictures of Modern Airliners”
1997	Renamed Airliners.net, own server
2007	Sale to Demand Media (later Leaf Group)
2014	Sister site MyAviation.net goes offline
2016	Relaunch with a new design on June 14
2017	Takeover by VerticalScope

How screening works

The heart of Airliners.net is screening. Every uploaded photo first lands in a queue and is not publicly visible. Experienced volunteers – the screeners – check it for content and quality. An image is accepted if it is technically high-quality or shows a subject of special documentary value, such as a historically significant event.

This results in three levels of review:

• Technique: Is the image sharp, straight, correctly exposed, color-neutral and free of visible artifacts?
• Subject: Does it show the aircraft completely and unobstructed, or is it a deliberately chosen detail or mood shot that makes sense for the database?
• Details: Are the registration, type, airline, location and date correct? A wrong type variant or a transposed digit in the registration is as much of a problem for a database as a blurry image.

The attitude behind it matters: Screening is not a photo contest. A moody image with a soft fuselage fails, a sober side view with perfect sharpness gets through. If you have understood that, you choose your images differently.

The upload criteria at a glance

Airliners.net sets its binding requirements in the upload guidelines. They contain minimum and maximum dimensions, permitted aspect ratios, file formats, editing rules and upload limits. These values change occasionally, so we deliberately give no pixel counts here: The current version on the site is always the one that counts. The principles by which large photo databases review, however, have been stable for years.

Criterion	What the screeners look for	What you can do
Sharpness	Registration, window line and edges clear, but without jaggies and bright halos	sharpen specifically after downsizing, check at 100 percent
Alignment	Aircraft and image level, vertical lines in the background vertical	align to poles, hangar edges or tower
Centering	Aircraft sits balanced in the frame, not cropped too tightly	shoot generously, crop cleanly
Exposure	Visible side of the aircraft well lit, no blown-out areas	shoot with the sun behind you, protect the highlights
Color	Neutral white balance, natural saturation	check white balance on the white fuselage
Image quality	No noise, no compression blocks in the sky	moderate ISO, high JPEG quality, do not re-save repeatedly
Subject	Complete, unobstructed aircraft or deliberately chosen detail	keep fence, grass and poles out of the line of sight
Authenticity	No manipulation of the image content	do not retouch anything in or out except sensor spots as permitted by the rules

Many of these points overlap with the criteria of other platforms. A detailed explanation of the individual rejection reasons is in the article Common rejection reasons in photo screening; the editing side is covered by the guide Editing photos for JetPhotos and similar sites.

What is decided at the fence

A large share of rejections arises not at the computer but at the moment of capture. Three classics can hardly or not at all be rescued in editing:

• Heat haze: On warm days, the air above the asphalt blurs outlines and titles. Sharpening makes it rather worse. Cooler times of day and shorter distances help – more in the guide Avoiding heat haze.
• Backlight: If the side facing you is in shadow, even brightening helps only so much and creates noise. How to deal with it is in the article on backlit aircraft photography.
• Obstructions: A fence post in front of the nose gear, a baggage cart in front of the engine or a pole through the tail are grounds for exclusion. Cloning them out is no solution, because it falsifies the documentary character.

Then there is image selection. Out of a series of twenty images of a landing, usually only one is really strong – the one with the sharpest registration, the cleanest background and the best attitude. Upload only that one. Several nearly identical variants do not raise your chances but risk a rejection for excessive similarity. A fixed routine as in the article Culling photos quickly helps with selecting.

Preparing your first upload

With the basics, the first upload becomes plannable. These steps have proven themselves:

For steps 3 and 4, a fixed routine is worthwhile, as described by the Lightroom workflow for aircraft photos. For output sharpening specifically there is the guide Sharpening aircraft photos without artifacts, and for alignment the article Cropping and straightening aircraft photos properly. If you want to check the exact type variant or the age of an aircraft, the overview of fleet databases helps.

Airliners.net, JetPhotos or Planespotters.net?

The three big platforms complement each other more than they exclude each other. Which one suits you depends on what you want to achieve with your photos.

If you are looking for more reach than documentation, Flickr for aircraft photographers or Instagram for plane spotters offer other routes that do without screening, but also award no quality stamp.

Rights, watermarks and forum

With the upload, you grant the platform usage rights to your image. Which ones exactly is in the terms of use – read them before you upload your first photo, especially if you also want to sell your images or submit them to contests. The basics of your rights are explained in the article Copyright in aircraft photos. Large watermarks of your own are generally unwelcome at photo databases; how to protect your images anyway is covered under Watermarks and image rights.

The forum of Airliners.net is, for many, the real reason to stop by regularly. Besides discussions on civil aviation, it has areas for aviation photographers where photographers exchange ideas about technique, editing and screening. Full participation may involve a fee; the current terms are on the site. A friendly tone and willingness to accept criticism help here – the etiquette among spotters applies online just as at the fence.

Conclusion

Airliners.net helped shape online spotting: A private picture collection in a Swedish dorm room became a database with millions of photos that, after several changes of ownership, belongs to VerticalScope today. What has remained is the manual screening that reviews every image before publication. If you know the criteria, select the strongest image of a series, edit with restraint and check your details carefully, you have a good chance of approval – and learn from every rejection.