Geograph Britain and Ireland is a web-based project, begun in March 2005, to create a freely accessible archive of geographically located photographs of Great Britain and Ireland. Photographs in the Geograph collection are chosen to illustrate significant or typical features of each 1 km × 1 km (100 ha) grid square in the Ordnance Survey National Grid and the Irish national grid reference system. There are 332,216 such grid squares containing at least some land or permanent structure (at low tide), of which 280,037 have Geographs.
Geographs are being collected for all parts of Great Britain, Isle of Man and Ireland. The Channel Islands fall outside Britain's grid system, but may be geographed using their local UTM grid.
The project is sponsored by the Ordnance Survey, and extracts from the OS Landranger 1:50,000 scale maps illustrate the grid square pages. Geograph Project Limited is a charity registered in England and Wales, and the name Geograph is trademarked.
Contributions
Photographs can be contributed by any registered user, although they must be approved by a panel of moderators before appearing on the website. The main aim of moderation is to make the site 'classroom ready' so that inappropriate images are rejected. All images are licensed by the contributors using the Creative Commons cc-by-sa 2.0 licence which permits modification and redistribution of the images under certain conditions. Contributors should be aware that they are granting everyone an irrevocable licence to use their image(s); it is very difficult to get an image removed once it appears on the website. Default photo resolution is a 1024 pixels long edge, with a minimum of 640 pixels and options for higher resolutions to be made available.
The entire archive of images with RDF metadata is available for download via BitTorrent.
As an incentive to increase coverage, participants are awarded a point each time they contribute the first photograph classified as a geograph to a grid square. There is, however, no limit to the number of images per square, and some squares have over 1000 images.
Some participants combine geographing with other outdoor location sports such as letterboxing, geocaching, trigpointing, benchmarking, and peak bagging.
Types of image
Geograph images are classified by site moderators as: Geograph – an image which usefully illustrates or characterises the area in which it was taken; Accepted – an image which adds useful information about a square but which does not meet the requirements of a geograph; this includes close-ups, interiors, aerial shots, photos taken from outside the grid square, moveable objects that can't be shown on maps and silhouetted images; this category has subcategories 'Close Look', 'Inside', 'Aerial', 'Cross Grid' and 'Extra'; Rejected – an image that does not meet the requirements of the Geograph Project.
There is a special classification of image that is known as a First Geograph – the first image uploaded of a particular grid square which meets the requirements to be a geograph. Contributors can also gain Second, Third and Fourth visitor points for each square, depending on how many other geographers have already submitted geographs to that square. The relevant date is when the photo was submitted, rather than taken.
A contributor gains a TPoint (Time-gap Point) by submitting a photo that was taken over five years after the most recent image for that square. A contributor can also gain a TPoint by submitting an historic photo to a square that was taken at least five years distant from any other photograph in the square.
The site also provides a count of the number of grid squares each contributor has photographed (Personal Points).
Some of the common themes for geograph photos include: Physical landscape Human land use Built environment Social interaction Geology Flora and fauna Local history
Statistics
As of November 2021, the project had over 7 million photographs from over 13,300 contributors, covering over 98% of Great Britain and over 46% of Ireland. There were an average of 24.9 images per grid square.