01Photograph requirements
Every submission needs at least four photographs, and you can add up to twelve. Four specific views are required, and you can set or change the view type on each photograph after adding it.
- Front / obverse — the face of the artifact, squared to the camera.
- Back / reverse — the opposite face, in the same lighting.
- Profile / edge — viewed side-on, to show thickness and cross-section.
- Scale / reference — the artifact photographed beside a measuring scale.
What counts as a scale reference
A usable scale lets someone measure the artifact from the photograph:
- a millimetre or inch ruler;
- a printed photographic scale bar;
- a coin of a stated denomination — tell us which coin.
Place the scale beside the artifact, never on top of it, laid flat in the same plane so both are in focus. A hand, a keyboard, a coin you do not identify, or any object of unstated size is not a usable scale.
Technical limits
- JPEG, PNG, WebP, and HEIC/HEIF from an iPhone are all accepted.
- Up to 15 MB per photograph.
- Four photographs minimum, twelve maximum.
If a HEIC photo shows "Preview unavailable on this browser" — that is expected. Chrome and Firefox on desktop cannot display HEIC files, but the photograph still uploads normally and is received correctly. Only the on-screen thumbnail is affected.
Photograph in even, indirect light against a plain neutral background, with the artifact filling most of the frame. Avoid direct flash, which flattens surface detail and hides flaking and wear.
02Submission problems
"Human verification could not load"
An ad blocker or content blocker is preventing Cloudflare Turnstile from loading. Allow artifactid.org in your blocker and reload the page, or try a different browser. The verification check is required and cannot be skipped.
An upload fails or stalls
Each photograph retries automatically before reporting a failure. If a photograph still will not upload, check your connection, then use Cancel upload — your form entries are kept — and try again. On a slow mobile connection, uploading twelve large photographs can take several minutes.
"The Contributor Agreement has been updated"
The published agreement changed while your form was open. Reload the page, review the current version, and accept it again. This is deliberate: an acceptance is only valid against the exact text you were shown.
"Your signature must match the full legal name entered above"
The name typed in the signature field must match the full legal name in the contributor section. Punctuation, accents and capitalisation are ignored, but the names themselves must correspond.
"Too many submissions from this network"
A rate limit protects the portal from automated abuse. Wait a short time and try again. If you are contributing a large collection and keep hitting this, email us and we will help.
You have a saved draft
If you started the form and left, your browser offers to restore your unfinished draft. Photographs, agreement acceptances and your typed signature are never saved and must be re-entered. The draft lives only on your own device and is erased when you submit or discard it.
03After you submit
You receive a reference code on screen. Save it — it is how we identify your submission if you contact us later.
Artifact ID reviews every submission. Not all submissions are accepted or published, and review is not instant. Receipt of a submission is not authentication, appraisal, or verification, and acceptance into the Reference Library is not a determination of authenticity, value, or legal ownership.
We may email you with questions about a submission, or to request additional photographs or information.
04Changing your attribution
You choose how you are credited: by your public name or collection name, as "Private Collection," or with no public identification at all. This choice is independent of your identity in our records — you can be fully identified to Artifact ID and still appear publicly as "Private Collection."
To change how an existing submission is credited, email [email protected] with your reference code and the attribution you would prefer.
05Withdrawal and deletion requests
You may ask Artifact ID to stop publicly displaying a submission, or to delete it. Email [email protected] and include:
- your reference code, or enough detail to identify the submission;
- the email address you used when submitting;
- whether you want the submission removed from public display, deleted entirely, or something else;
- if you are making a request under a specific privacy law, say which — for example the GDPR or the CCPA — so we can apply the correct process and timeline.
We will ask you to confirm control of the email address associated with the submission before acting. This protects contributors: without it, anyone could delete someone else's contribution.
What we can and cannot undo
We can stop displaying a submission publicly, and we can delete the original photographs from storage.
What cannot always be undone. Under sections 4 and 13 of the Contributor Agreement, submitted material may already have been incorporated into machine-learning models, backups, publications, licensed datasets or derivative works. Once that has happened, deleting the original submission may not make it technically possible to remove what was already derived from it.
Artifact ID will comply with deletion and privacy obligations where required by applicable law, but cannot guarantee retroactive removal from all previously created or distributed material. If this limitation matters to you, please weigh it before contributing.
Deleting a submission does not delete the record that you accepted the Contributor Agreement. That record is evidence of a past legal act and is retained separately, as described in the Privacy Policy.
06Privacy questions
The Privacy Policy covers what is collected, what stays private, where it is stored, how long it is kept, and your rights. For anything it does not answer, email [email protected].
Short version: your email address and legal name are never published, your original photographs are stored privately and are not publicly readable, and your public attribution is entirely your choice.