General Rules and Vision

Thank you for considering to contribute to Fanart.tv. Please take the time read through this page to save both you and the volunteer staff here time and frustration. Knowing the site motto will help to understand the standards we set.

No Image is Better Than a Low Quality Image

We understand that sometimes there just aren’t very good sources to work with, but in those cases you should either get very creative and do your best to re-create the art in higher quality, or upload it to one of the many other fanart sites that don’t moderate. Our goal is not to have an image for every single show/movie/album, but to have a Great Image for every single show/movie/album. It’s also a good thing to remember that just because an image doesn’t work well for our library here, doesn’t mean you can’t use it in your own media center. If you think your image is perfectly fine for your needs, then you should use it on your system.

You will find a bulletpoint list of rules for each image type we host and you should read and understand each one. You should ask in the forums if you are having trouble understanding the rules. This is preferred over sending a PM to a mod as the question can serve to help others in the future.

The following rules don’t really fit in a bulletpoint and are more general. These rules cover different image types and goes to the vision of the site.

Similar Images
Do not try to create every type of logo/image combination you can think of. Each image should be unique and stand on it’s own. If you want to offer a different logo option, you should create an entirely new image for it instead of just slapping it onto the same image as the other logo. What you end up with is a bloated library section of basically the same images that someone has to wade though.
The same goes for different zoom levels of the same image, or images that are only “slightly” different from each other.
You should treat each image as it’s own unique entity and stand-alone piece of art.

Similar Images Part 2: AKA Languages
Each user will now be limited to creating a piece of art in a maximum of 2 languages. Even if they are all unique pieces of art.
We really don’t want to swamp our database with a zillion images in every possible language/format that exists. If there is an interest for some art in a language that is not available, it will prompt that user to either create that artwork themselves, or they can use the request system. This way only images that are in demand are getting produced, and we are not filling up our pages with art gathering dust.
Our goal should be to try and fill in or make artwork where there is none. This is much more helpful to the site. One look at our Incomplete Section should give plenty of opportunities for people who want to produce a lot of art and want to really help the site at the same time.

Collection Art
Collection art should reflect characters or elements that were in all the movies. The idea of collection art is to represent the entire collection, and not just one movie. This can be difficult sometimes but creativity should win out in the end if the effort is there. In the case where the main actor has changed, you could have all the main role actors in the same poster/clearart/banner etc. Or even an element that spans all the movies. Point is, if you make an art with a main character and a villain from a single movie, then that should be used for that movie and not as collection art.

Title Languages
If the title of a Movie/TV Show is identical in any country to the title in English, the image MUST be uploaded as English. It is your responsibility to check imdb or tvdb before you upload it.
English is the default language as well as the fallback language in Media Centers, this will ensure the artwork is available to the widest audience possible. When we move to the new site, we will have an option to set a piece of art to multiple languages which will make this rule obsolete, but until then please observe this rule.

Lastly…
Trying to grind through the missing art in your library may cloud your judgement of what’s good and what’s “good enough“. Uploading every image you make with no interest whether it passes or not, is not acceptable.
Try to be confident before uploading so you are not stealing a moderators time and wasting your own.