This is a convenience translation. In case of discrepancies, the German version of these guidelines prevails.
On Gartenkern you can set a profile picture and upload photos of your plantings, beds, and journal entries. This page explains in plain words what works and what does not. It supplements the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy.
What your profile picture is for
Your profile picture shows the person behind the entries. When you share a garden, your family or your allotment club can see at a glance who planted the tomatoes, who watered, and who wrote the entry. That is all it needs to do. It is not a billboard and not an advertising space.
A profile picture is optional. Without one you can still see and do everything; your initials appear in its place.
What works well
Anything that helps others recognise you. For example:
- a photo of you, ideally in the garden with soil on your hands
- a portrait against a plain background
- a drawing, a watercolour, or any picture you made yourself
- a view of your plot, your raised bed, or your balcony
- a plant you grew yourself, say your tomato 'Berner Rose'
A simple snapshot is plenty. Nothing needs to be perfectly lit.
What is not allowed
Pictures with the following content are not permitted:
- Other identifiable people without their consent. If someone else is in the frame, ask them first. For children you need their parents' consent.
- Sexual or pornographic material, including suggestive imagery.
- Violence, injuries, or cruelty towards people or animals.
- Hate symbols, extremist or unconstitutional signs, and imagery that demeans people because of their origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or age.
- Content that breaks the law.
- Other people's images that you have no rights to. A photo from an image search, a cartoon character, or a press photo is not yours to use.
- Advertising: company logos, brands, QR codes, web addresses, phone numbers, or other contact details inside the image.
- Deliberate deception: pictures used to pass yourself off as another real person, as a public authority, or as Gartenkern itself.
If you are unsure whether a picture fits, it probably does not. When in doubt, pick a photo from your own garden.
Technical rules
- Formats: JPG, PNG, or WebP.
- Size: 5 MB per image at most.
- Cropping: Profile pictures are cropped to a square, so put your subject in the middle or the edges will be cut off.
- Metadata: On upload we strip the EXIF data, including the GPS coordinates written by your camera. Where you took the photo never leaves your device.
- Conversion: We convert your image to WebP and store it in two sizes, a small one for lists and a medium one for profile views. That saves data, which matters when you are out in the garden on mobile.
Who can see your profile picture
Your profile picture is visible to the people you share a garden account with, meaning the members of your workspace. It is not published on the open web, does not appear in search engines, and is not passed on to third parties.
Other images follow the visibility of whatever they belong to. If you share a journal entry through an unlisted link, everyone holding that link can see the photos in it.
How review works
An uploaded picture is visible immediately, so you never wait for approval. Afterwards a person from our team checks whether it fits these guidelines.
If it does not, we remove it and send you an email with a short reason. Your account is not affected, and you can upload a new picture right away. Only for repeated or serious breaches do we take the measures described in section 9 of the Terms of Service.
If you think a removal was wrong, simply reply to that email or write to support@gartenkern.de. We will take another look.
Changing or removing your picture
You can swap or delete your profile picture at any time in your settings. A deleted picture is removed from storage and not archived.
These rules apply to every photo
Everything here applies not only to profile pictures but to every image you upload to Gartenkern: photos of plantings, beds, harvests, journal entries, receipts, and meter readings. The same holds there: no other people without their consent, no images you do not hold the rights to, no prohibited content.
If you come across an image that does not belong here, report it through the "Report content" link in the page footer or write to support@gartenkern.de.