Okay so this is going to be a little bit of a rant, a long one... I was at first going to just be silent about this but when I saw this thread and that other new members are struggling with similar problems, I thought I must post this here. It's about the photo rules and the photo approving process. Don't get me wrong, I love rules, I love that they are actually written and well justified. But when it comes to practice, there's definitely a big problem, and I'm not quite sure what exactly causes all the confusion. Are there some unwritten rules? Have different photo moderators different standards when accepting photos? Or why is it so that sometimes photos that seem to be perfectly fine are rejected but many times photos breaking the rules are accepted?
It would be extremely important that all rules would be clearly written. Some people might think that it's not a big deal if a photo gets rejected but actually to many it might be. You probably know that there's lots of confunsing things happening at the other major fragrance forum and many people (including me) are leaving that place and switching to international Parfumo. Many of us are mainly photographers. I have heard many times that "you can always publish anything in your personal album or blog" but that's not an answer. Doing that is similar to having the pictures just in your own computer gallery. No one sees them so what's the point to do lots of effort for pics that no one sees? Your followers won't get any notifications of photos published in your personal album (could that be changed by the way?). I have put lots of time and effort to write blog articles but literally 2 or 3 people read them. It's so frustrating. Probably blog articles are an answer at the German Parfumo which is more active but here at the international site no one is interested. Plus the German users should always switch the language before even seeing them (they can't even see them in the users' profiles without changing the language!) and they don't bother to do that. But photos are shown to everybody and every language directly on the frontpage, they get so much more visibility.
Okay, so we artistic photographers do our best to combine the art and Parfumo rules. We spend HOURS to plan and prepare the photos. Just to get rejected even though we thought we followed all rules. Then the frontpage is full of quick snaps taken via smartphone camera in 2 minutes with a plain background, those of course always get accepted. And it's okay, but due to the amount of effort it feels wrong and feels that art isn't appreciated here. Feels that Parfumo appreciates just plain pictures and they would always be preferable, and people who create art are secondary. But how many plain quick snap pictures there are in the most awarded Parfumo pictures hall of fame or on the "top photos" of the frontpage? Right, none. All of those are the artistic ones. Artistic pictures bring more views to Parfumo so I think artistic photographers should get more appreciation and visibility. If the standards for rejecting artistic pictures keep being confusing, I think many art photographers won't have patience to stay here, (like you can read from the thread that I linked), it might be a major issue for them and Parfumo needs to realize that it's a big loss. Parfumo should do everything it can to keep growing into the world's biggest fragrance forum, you have potential for this now more than ever and I hope you will realize that. Sticking to the belief that only plain pictures are the best ones to showcase the bottle is ridiculous.
Therefore I have a suggestion. As the rules are well justified, no need to change them. Just write all rules down transparently, there should be no unwritten rules. I completely understand the limited resources of the moderators and why the questions about why a certain pic was rejected won't be answered, however would it be too much work to add one useful feature? You could number the rules, and every time when a moderator rejects a submitted photo, they would just click which rule it was breaking. All photographers would get a notification for example "your photo was rejected because of the rule number 6". Then the photographer would get a hint of the reason for the rejection. That would in the long run save everybody's time and effort - the photographers could either re-edit or re-crop the pic to match the rules or take a new pic and avoid the same mistake. At the moment it feels very burdening and puzzling when you simply don't know which error you made. You would like to try again but you probably don't have the motivation to make all the effort again because you're not sure if your pic would be rejected again for the same unknown reason.
To prove my point of the confusion, I'll attach to this post two of my pictures that were rejected and I still have no idea why. Both fragrances have zero pics here yet so I thought I was doing a favour to Parfumo when I tried my best to express the notes of both fragrances and make them look intriguing. I took multiple shots, made multiple edits and crops and tried them all but no matter which version of the pic series I tried to submit, they were rejected every time. In my pics of Vanilla Chai the fragrance is on the front, the label is perfectly visible and focused, there's a cup of chai tea (the name of the perfume) and notes: cinnamon, star anise, vanilla, cardamom and saffron. In my pics of Pumpkin Cake Pops the fragrance is on the front and perfectly focused (there's no label in this official bottle of an indie brand as you can see from the database pic), there are small pumpkins and a piece of a pumpkin cake. Can't figure out what's against the rules and now I have no idea how I could try to create new notes pics of these fragrances because I don't know what I did wrong. It puzzles me even more that many other ones of my pics that had very similar arrangements were accepted so I can't figure out why they were ok but these weren't. So in these cases it would save everybody's nerves to get even a little clue what's wrong here.