The rule
Every image on this site is fetched from Wikimedia Commons, and every candidate is judged on
its own extmetadata before it is downloaded. If the licence field is missing,
unreadable, or names anything other than public domain, CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, the file is
skipped. It is never downloaded, so it can never be published by accident.
This Atlas does not assume that a file on Commons is free to use. That assumption is the single most common way reference sites end up infringing.
What is stored for every image
The database refuses an image record without a licence and a source URL. Each one carries: the file path, the media type, the title, the caption as written by the source, the alt text, what it depicts, the creator, the source (Wikimedia Commons), the file page URL, the licence, the licence URL, the exact attribution line where one is required, the dimensions, and the date it was retrieved.
Attribution-required licences are accepted precisely because that credit line is rendered under every image and in the lightbox, linked to both the licence text and the original file page. Public domain and CC0 files are preferred and rank first.
What is excluded, and why
- Files whose licence cannot be read.
- Files carrying a restrictions notice — typically trademark or personality-rights warnings.
- Non-commercial or no-derivatives variants.
- Coats of arms, flags, logos, seals, stamps, banknotes and emblems.
- Maps, diagrams, charts and screenshots, which are handled as data rather than photography.
- Anything below 800 × 500 pixels, and extreme panoramas that crop dishonestly in a card.
Nothing is copied onto this site from Google Images, TripAdvisor, travel blogs, news sites, hotel sites, estate agents or social media. Unsplash and Pexels are not used.
Photographs, and things that are not photographs
Commons holds a great deal of pre-photographic material, and some of it is valuable — an 1851 view of Gjirokastër by Edward Lear belongs on a history page. It must never be presented as a photograph of the place today. Every image is classified and labelled: Photograph, Aerial photograph, Painting, Engraving, Lithograph, Drawing, Postcard or Historical view. The label appears on the caption whenever the image is not a plain photograph.
Where a picture goes
Every picture on this site shows something the page is about. A card for a place carries a photograph of that place — that exact beach, that exact town — and no picture appears twice on one page: where a page already shows a place's lead photograph, the next card for that place takes another of its own photographs.
Guides, explainers and comparisons cannot be photographed, so each shows a photograph of something it genuinely covers and says so on the picture: the driving guide shows the A1, the UNESCO explainer shows Butrint, and a comparison shows its two places side by side, each in its own lead photograph. A photograph qualifies only if the page names its subject or covers it as a place. Where nothing a page covers can honestly illustrate it, the page carries a designed panel instead. Section fronts carry a wide photograph of something inside that section, credited like every other photograph here.
Until 15 September 2026 some cards simply borrowed the photograph of a neighbouring page — a lagoon near Vlorë illustrated three different beaches. That was wrong, and it was removed: a picture of something a page is not about misleads a reader about what a place looks like.
The image that introduces a subject must be a photograph of it. Paintings, engravings, postcards and historical views are welcome further down a page, where the caption names them for what they are, but they never lead a page: Edward Lear's 1851 views of Berat and Shkodër had been filed as photographs and were leading both city pages until this was corrected.
The news page is the one place a picture is not a licensed Commons file. A story may show the picture its publisher attaches to it in the publisher's own feed: it is loaded from the publisher, shown only beside that story's link and credited to the publisher, and it is never copied onto this site.
There is no AI-generated imagery anywhere on this site.
If you are the rights holder
If an image here is misattributed, mislicensed, or you would like it removed, use the correction form on the page it appears on, or the contact page. Say which image and what is wrong, and it will be corrected or taken down.
Maps
Boundary geometry is from geoBoundaries (gbOpen ALB ADM1, public domain) and is rendered as SVG by this site. No proprietary map tiles are copied or cached. Where a page offers a zoomable map it links out to OpenStreetMap with its attribution intact.