Uploading photos to JetPhotos: requirements, screening and tips

Your first photo for JetPhotos is edited, the registration razor sharp, the horizon level. Now all that is missing is the upload – and that is exactly where many beginners fail even though the image itself is flawless. A wrong airport code, a guessed date or a forgotten category is enough for a rejection. This guide walks you through the complete upload to JetPhotos: from the account through the image details to screening, Hot Photo and appeals. How to edit the photo itself so that it passes the quality check is described in the companion article editing photos for JetPhotos and similar sites.

What JetPhotos is and why uploading is worth it

JetPhotos has existed since November 2002, and since August 2015 the platform has belonged to Flightradar24. By its own account it is the largest aviation photo database on the web; the About page lists (as of October 2026) almost seven million photos from a good 33,000 photographers. For spotters, the link to Flightradar24 is especially interesting: according to its own support, the tracking service does not host any aircraft photos of its own but shows images from JetPhotos. So when you click an aircraft in Flightradar24, you will, in the best case, see your photo.

JetPhotos is also documentation: every photo is attached to a registration, a type, an airline and a location. Over the years, this builds up the life story of individual aircraft – including livery changes, re-registrations and operator changes. That is exactly why JetPhotos takes the details as seriously as image quality.

Step 1: Create an account and choose a display name

Nothing works without an account. According to the terms of use, you provide a display name, your email address and a password when registering and then confirm the account by email. A prerequisite is that you are of legal age under the law of your country of residence. According to Flightradar24 support, the account itself costs nothing.

Do not underestimate the display name. JetPhotos automatically adds a frame to every uploaded photo, with this name in it. It is therefore your photographer credit on thousands of images and on Flightradar24. A nickname from your school days quickly looks out of place there. In addition, you can choose a JetPhotos watermark of its own when uploading; custom watermarks, on the other hand, are not allowed. How to protect your image rights beyond that is covered under watermarks and image rights.

Step 2: Prepare the photo

Before you open the upload dialog, the image should be finished. The guidelines permit aspect ratios between 4:3 and 3:2 as well as 16:9. You have to crop off white borders, otherwise a “Cropping” rejection looms. Which pixel dimensions apply to your account is shown in the upload area; they can change and partly depend on your account’s status. You can find the known benchmarks and a calculator for the right image height in the article on the acceptance criteria, and how to set up the format cleanly in the guide cropping and aligning aircraft photos correctly.

Also important is the platform’s basic rule: unaltered images only. Cloning out is allowed only for spots that look like sensor dust – how that works is shown in finding and removing sensor spots. JetPhotos treats anything else as manipulation, which can lead to rejection, restricted upload rights or, if repeated, a ban. You may, however, blur the license plates of other people’s cars in the picture – readable license plates and clearly recognizable, non-posing people can trigger a rejection under “Motive” for privacy reasons.

Milder standards apply to scanned slides and prints. If you have to retouch damage on an old scan, you note that in the comments field for the screeners. According to the guidelines, rules on composition and obstruction do not apply to rare old scans.

Step 3: Fill in the image details correctly

This is where it is decided whether your photo comes back as “Bad Info”. According to the guidelines, uploads with details that could easily have been researched are rejected immediately.

Field	What you enter	Typical mistake
Registration	Registration of the aircraft; for formations, that of the lead aircraft	Registration guessed instead of verified
Serial number (CN)	Construction number of the aircraft, often added by auto-fill	Field left empty although the CN is easy to find
Airline	Operator at the time of capture; private aircraft as “Private”	“Unknown” chosen although the operator is known
Airport	four-letter ICAO code, e.g. EDDF for Frankfurt (IATA and ICAO codes explained)	IATA code or special characters entered
Date	exact capture date with day, month and year	only month given or date altered
Genre	civil or military according to the current registration	Police and government aircraft classified as military
Categories	e.g. Night Shot, Special Scheme, Cargo, Warbird/Vintage	Category forgotten or chosen wrongly

A few details from the guidelines that are often overlooked in practice:

• Use auto-fill, but check it. The automatic completion usually delivers all the data including the serial number. You are still responsible for correct details. A look at existing photos of the same registration helps as a cross-check – as do fleet databases like Planespotters.net.
• Registration unknown? Then the field stays empty. Guessing is not an option. How to work out a hard-to-read registration anyway is shown in identifying an unreadable registration.
• Do not touch the date. For digital photos, JetPhotos expects the exact date. A date altered afterward counts as manipulation. Only for sensitive locations does JetPhotos in some cases accept month and year – with an explanation in the comments field for the screeners. Clean EXIF data makes things easier, more on that in labeling photos correctly.
• Location not released? For sensitive military airfields you use “Other Location” with the addition “Undisclosed”. If the airport you want is not in the menu, you can have it added via a form.
• Photos from the air. For wing shots from the window you give the country and “Inflight”, unless an airport is visible. “International Airspace” is only intended for shots over the open sea.

Step 4: Set the right categories

Categories help others search, but they also influence the review. The most important ones from the guidelines at a glance:

• Night Shot: for shots at dusk and night. Silhouettes against a rising or setting sun are the one exception where backlight is accepted. Pure light trails from a long exposure you upload as an Airport Overview with Night Shot. Tips for shooting are in photographing aircraft at night.
• Special Scheme: only for liveries that deviate clearly from the fleet standard – retro jets, themed liveries or large advertising and anniversary decals. Hybrid liveries and all-white aircraft do not count.
• Warbird/Vintage: for aircraft whose production began before 1970, for aircraft no longer in regular service, museum aircraft and replicas.
• Wing View, Cabin, Flight Deck: for window shots with a visible wing or engine, cabin and cockpit photos. Of window and cockpit pictures from the same aircraft, JetPhotos generally does not accept more than two, according to the guidelines.
• Business Jet, Cargo, Helicopter, Small Prop: by design; tiltrotor aircraft like the V-22 Osprey go under Helicopter, and Small Prop applies to types with up to ten passengers.
• Airport Overview: for terminals, towers and spotter locations. In this case you enter the ICAO code in both the registration and the airport field.

Hot Photo: when recency counts

According to the guidelines, JetPhotos takes the rarity of a photo into account during screening. This becomes especially clear with the Hot Photo rule, which according to the guidelines was last revised in July 2026. It is divided into two groups:

24 hours after the first accepted photo count as hot: a new aircraft type or subtype from a manufacturer, a new type at an airline or air force (including roll-out and test flights at the factory), the first sighting of a new airline livery, the first sighting of a special livery including alliance liveries, and other newsworthy events at the discretion of the screening team.

Only for the very first accepted photo count as hot – this applies exclusively to active aircraft and, according to JetPhotos, serves the recency of Flightradar24: a new delivery of a type the airline already operates, a repaint, any change to an airliner’s livery (such as a removed special livery or new decals) as well as registrations that are not yet in the database, or a registration that was transferred to a new aircraft.

For you this means: if you photograph a freshly delivered aircraft or a new special livery, a quick upload is worthwhile. If you specifically look for such opportunities, you benefit from sighting alerts for registrations, types and special liveries – more on that in finding special liveries. How to find a particular aircraft live is shown in tracking an aircraft by registration.

Step 5: Screening and queue

After you submit, your photo lands in a queue. According to the terms of use, it is checked by volunteer screeners. On the About page, JetPhotos lists an international team of site management, administrators, database editors, senior screeners and screeners, including several from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. There is no fixed processing time. Until a decision is made, the photo is not publicly visible.

In the end there is one of two decisions: accepted or rejected with a reason given. Besides the quality and composition reasons, there are formal rejections that have nothing to do with image quality:

• Double: You uploaded the same image twice.
• File Error: An error occurred during upload, the file is unreadable. Simply upload it again.
• Similar: A very similar photo from you is already in the database – for example from the same sequence on the same day, or with the same registration, angle and background on a different day. A clearly better version can still be accepted.
• Bad Info / Categories: wrong details or wrongly chosen categories.

You will find an overview of all quality reasons – from “Soft” to “Heat Distortion” – with remedies in the article common rejection reasons in photo screening.

Step 6: Appeal – when it makes sense

Screeners are human, and JetPhotos admits as much in the guidelines itself. That is why there is an appeal process: you briefly and factually explain why the photo was, in your view, wrongly rejected. A member of the senior screening team then makes the final decision, and you receive an email.

Two rules apply. First: abusive explanations lead to immediate rejection of the appeal and can result in a ban. Second: the appeal is not an advice channel. According to JetPhotos, anyone who wants to know how to improve a photo should use the aviation photography forums. There, many spotters show their images before uploading for an assessment. A friendly tone pays off – more in the article etiquette among spotters.

After acceptance: what happens at Flightradar24

An accepted photo is not automatically the image that Flightradar24 shows for a flight. According to Flightradar24 support, several conditions apply:

• The newest date wins. Flightradar24 prefers the photo with the most recent capture date. A newer image of the same registration displaces yours.
• The whole aircraft must be visible. Details, silhouettes and partial views are not displayed, so that the livery stays clearly recognizable.
• Certain categories drop out. Photos tagged Cabin, Wing View or Cockpit do not appear there.
• Passing on can be deselected. According to the terms of use, you can specify per photo that it appears only on JetPhotos and not in the Flightradar24 services.

Because Flightradar24 matches photos by registration, a photo of the old aircraft can briefly show up after a registration is transferred. A fresh upload helps exactly here – and that is exactly what the Hot Photo rule for reused registrations is for.

Rights and license: what you give up when uploading

A point many skip: the terms of use. According to JetPhotos, the rights to your photos stay with you. By uploading, however, you grant JetPhotos and Flightradar24 a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license. Among other things, it allows showing, distributing and editing the photos on the website, in the Flightradar24 services and in their social media channels. Whether a photo appears publicly, is shared on social media or is used at Flightradar24 is decided by JetPhotos at its own discretion.

You also affirm that you have all the necessary rights to the photo. So only upload your own images. If you want a photo removed later, you send a request to the JetPhotos team according to the terms. And because the platform gives no guarantee of permanent storage, every original also belongs in your own archive. If you want to show your images elsewhere too, you will find alternatives in Flickr for aircraft photographers and the upload tips for Airliners.net.

Conclusion

A successful upload to JetPhotos has two halves: a technically clean photo and correct details. You take care of the first half at the spot and at the computer, the second in the upload dialog – with a verified registration, ICAO code, exact date and the right categories. If you know the Hot Photo rules, you upload novelties quickly. If you take the reason for rejections seriously and use the appeal only selectively, you will reliably see your photos in the database and on Flightradar24.