It seems that several people’s images are not appearing on this blog’s sidebar, although they have been added to the DrawMo! Flickr pool. After extensive reading in the Fiickr support forums and FAQ pages, I’ve got a couple of theories about why this is happening.
Case 1
Mandy’s drawing isn’t showing up because she’s new to Flickr and has posted only one image to her account. Apparently your photos won’t be displayed in “public areas” such as a group pool until you’ve posted at least five and have shown that you can filter your own content correctly.
Filtering your content requires flagging each image in two ways, as set forth by Flickr:
- Safety Level
- Safe – Content suitable for a global, public audience
- Moderate – If you’re not sure whether your content is suitable for a global, public audience but you think that it doesn’t need to be restricted per se, this category is for you
- Restricted – This is content you probably wouldn’t show to your mum, and definitely shouldn’t be seen by kids
- Content Type
- Photo
- Art / Illustration / CGI or other non-photographic images, or
- Screenshot
So, for example, Mandy’s first drawing should be marked as “Art / Illustration / CGI or other non-photographic images” and . . . I don’t know. In my community, NYC, it would definitely be considered safe, but in Singapore it might be risqué. So I guess I’d call that “Moderate.”
According to Flickr, as long as Mandy flags this and her next four images in a way that they find reasonable, her drawings should start showing up on our sidebar and in the photo pool. If that doesn’t turn out to be the case, I’ll contact tech support directly and ask what’s up. In the meantime, Mandy can embed her drawings in blog posts. I’ve put instructions for that on a separate page.
Case 2
temporalmillionaire, on the other hand, has been posting drawings to Flickr for more than a year. And that’s very likely why her pictures aren’t showing up, either.
The problem, I suspect, is that temporalmillionaire has been NIPSA’d. Flickr used to strongly discourage people from posting anything other than photographs. If you posted more than one or two drawings or screenshots, they would mark your whole account as NIPSA—“not in public site areas”—and none of your pictures would show up in searches or group pools. This happened to me last year. In early 2007 Flickr started allowing you to mark your non-photo pictures as such, as I’ve described above, but they didn’t un-NIPSA accounts that had already been marked that way. You have to ask them to do it.
To see if you’ve been NIPSA’d, look at the top of your account page. If you’re okay, it should say, “Your account has been reviewed as safe by Flickr staff.” If it says anything else, you’ve probably entered block-o-land, somehow. To get unblocked, make sure all your existing pictures are categorized properly, as described in Case 1 (if you have a lot of images, you may want to do this through the Organizer—Safety Level and Content Type can both be changed through the Permissions menu), and then go to the help form and ask them to review your account.
Case 3
If your drawings are all marked as “public,” you’re not a Flickr newbie, and you haven’t somehow gotten tagged as a Naughty Person by the Flickr fairies, you may simply have bad juju. You could try contacting them to ask what’s up, or you can work around it by embedding your Flickr images into blog posts.
Here’s that page I made that shows how to embed a Flickr image into a blog post.
DrawMo! 
Thanks India, for all the detective work – I’ll work on the tagging, or flagging, or what you call it.I’ll keep the content clean, and we’ll see what happens, Mandy.