After reviewing--and sadly, rejecting--a bunch of submitted photo reviews this morning, I thought I would share some top-secret tips with you all. Below is the list we select from when we review a photo:

A lot of those rejection reasons have to do with the clearly stated requirements for uploading pics:

•The photo must be your own. You can't submit photos that you didn't take.
•You MUST be wearing the jewelry.
•.jpg files only
•500 x 500 pixels ONLY. Make sure you pre-crop your photo to this size.
•Quality, close-up photos only. Any others will not be approved. (No camera phone pictures. No blurry photos.)
•Only one type of jewelry focused on per photo.
•No nudity or "private" areas

It surprises me how frequently we get pictures that don't even come close to being approvable, so I thought that reiterating the guidelines would help those who never noticed them before to learn, and to remind those who may have forgotten a couple along the way.

Think of it this way: BAF is giving you free store credits for submitting these, so please be considerate and give them a photo that will really show off the jewelry.

We DO check the other pictures that have been submitted to make sure there are no duplicates, and if we feel someone is trying to scam BAF we DO report it. I for one am a total hard ass on picture submissions, and though I tend to approve more than I reject, it amazes me how awful a lot of the submissions are.

And one pet peeve of mine when I review... When you have a nice picture of the jewelry in with a smaller picture of the jewelry pasted into the corner or something. Most of the time I do deny these, because the extra picture takes away from the piece being worn, and the jewelry can easily be seen unworn on the product page. And a lot of the time, the edges of the picture pasted into it are on the jewelry being worn... I really think it creates a distraction and its harder to focus on the jewelry being worn...

I think each mod has their own pet peeve. Mine is the pic not being the right size. I also rejected a ton of blurry pics this morning, one scam, and some cell phone pics that were totally pixelated.

I tried to submit a picture and was told it was a duplicate.  I checked my account and it doesnt show up in "Your photo gallery".  I'm not sure if i recieved the credit for it or not.  No big deal, just an FYI kinda thing.

 I guess I'm kindof camera/picture challenged, but how do I crop a picture to exactly 500x500?

You need a photo editing program such as Photoshop or MS Paint.

You can use MS Paint.  When you use the rectangly-outline tool, the dimensions of the box you are cutting will show at the bottom.

Make sure if you're using MS Paint that you save the file as a JPEG and not a BMP.

 

Also, online picture resizers are a useful alternative too: http://www.resize2mail.com/advanced.php

When I'm going to make a pic exactly 500x500, I crop the sides of the pic so they are the same dimentions(my camara takes big pics, so say 1300x1300) then I'm able to resize the pics demintions just by putting in 500 and it resizes the other side the same. And I just use the microsoft picture manager that is standard. I don't have a resizer on my laptop tho :( 

I use the crop tool in photoshop and constrain image size to 500x500.

 I usually use paint for cropping pictures.  thanks for the help, everyone!

 I have a tip to ask.

 I use a lifecam 1.1 (first version ever) and my pictures are smaller than 500x500. If I I stretch it at that size, they are rejected because of blurriness.  The lifecamCD doesn't work on my cp, so I use paint (on XP). 

How can I make the pictures 500x500 from about 320x240?

 You could paste it into a new file that is 500x500, as long as they don't mind having pictures with borders.

 Yeah, tried that (like in my avatar). Got a "too small" notice because the picture is still in 320x240.

 

That's a good idea tough, I'd have to consult with a mod to be sure my 457957 pictures won't be refused again and avoid them a whole hour of rejecting lol.

Lindsey:

I use the crop tool in photoshop and constrain image size to 500x500.

I use the square marquee tool in PS and select the "fixed size" in the style drop down menu and then just enter in "500" in both boxes. THEN I go edit -> copy and paste into a new document that is 500x500. Sounds like more work but I like to keep my pix in their original size as well as the cropped size in case I want to do something with the picture later.