Image and Content Guidelines

The rest of the documentation tells you what size an image needs to be. This page covers the other half — whether you are allowed to use the image at all. Two questions come up again and again: photographs that contain real people, and third-party artwork such as real airline liveries, logos and photography.

Photographs of Real People

If a real, identifiable person appears in an image you upload, you need that person's permission — and you need to be able to show that you have it. That applies to activity artwork, Picture Board banners, custom page images, staff avatars, NOTAM images and anything else you put into vAMSYS.

The Acceptable Use Policy says so explicitly, in its general rule in §10 — post only content you have the right to post, and do not post content that infringes anyone else's intellectual property or other rights — and §4 separately prohibits publishing another person's private information without their consent.

In practice, treat it as one test: get the person's permission before the image goes up, and keep something that shows you have it.

Real Airline Liveries, Logos and Artwork

There is no ban on real-world airline branding. Both the 2026 Terms of Service §7 and the Virtual Airline Owner Terms §2.8 open by acknowledging that VAs are modelled on real-world airlines, using names, logos, liveries and callsigns inspired by them — §2.8 adds prefixes and branding to that list. vAMSYS hosts that content and takes no position on its legality.

The rule is about rights, not subject matter. The choice of name, prefix, branding, logos and liveries is the VA's own choice, and the Owner is responsible for making sure the VA has the rights and permissions it needs to use them. The same test applies to any third-party artwork you upload: marketing photography, aircraft photographs, anything you did not make yourself.

Who Carries the Responsibility

There are two separate layers here, and they often sit with different people.

• You, personally — the Terms of Service and the Acceptable Use Policy apply to everyone who uses vAMSYS: Users, Pilots, VA Staff and Owners alike. You are responsible for your own content, and by providing it you confirm that you have the rights needed to provide it and that it does not breach the Terms, the Acceptable Use Policy, anyone else's rights, or the law (Terms of Service 2026 §6.3).

• The Owner — separately warrants that the VA has the necessary rights and permissions for the names, branding, liveries and content it uses (Virtual Airline Owner Terms §2.8). Breach of that warranty makes the Owner liable for loss directly and reasonably caused, including legal costs, damages and settlement in handling a third party's claim — and that liability is not subject to the liability cap in the Terms of Service §10.3.

The person who clicks upload and the person carrying the financial exposure are therefore often not the same person. If you are staff rather than the Owner, an image you upload is still the Owner's problem as well as yours.

You keep ownership of what you upload. vAMSYS takes only a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, display, adapt and process it, solely to the extent necessary to provide, operate, secure, support and improve the service for you and your VA (Terms of Service 2026 §6.1).

If a VA changes hands, each Owner's liability under the §2.8 warranty covers breaches during their own period of ownership — but operational risk transfers in full. A VA can still be suspended or removed over a breach whose cause predates the transfer.

Attribution Is Not a Licence

Photographs also reach vAMSYS without anyone uploading anything. When an airframe has no aircraft image and no fleet image, a background job looks the registration up against Planespotters and caches the photograph, the photographer's name as the attribution, and a link back to the source. The cascade is aircraft image, then fleet image, then Planespotters.

Letting that fallback run is not your upload. Taking a Planespotters photograph and uploading it as your own aircraft image is — at that point it is your content and your responsibility. vAMSYS already keeps Planespotters photographs out of Operations API responses because their terms of use do not permit re-exposure; only VA-uploaded images are returned there.

See Aircraft for the attribution fields and the full image cascade.

Content Standards

Rights aside, the Acceptable Use Policy sets a general bar for what belongs on vAMSYS. The 2026 Policy puts it as clean, professional and broadly family-friendly, and §3 rules out sexual or adult content, hate or discriminatory content, harassment, bullying or threats, graphic violence, and extremist or terrorist content. The Policy in force today bans the same categories in its own wording. That applies to an image exactly as it applies to text.

Where Images Enter vAMSYS

Every one of these surfaces is covered by the same rules. In Orwell:

• Operations → Activities — the Image and Image dark fields on activities, and on the dedicated Community Goal and Community Challenge screens. Needs Can Manage Activities, and the Activities module switched on for your VA.

• HQ → Pages → Picture Board — banner images and their Image - Dark Mode variants. Needs Can Manage Pages.

• HQ → Pages → Phoenix Dashboard — the Image block on the dashboard builder, with its Image and Image - Dark Mode fields. Needs Can Manage Pages.

• HQ → Pages → Custom Pages — the Image block in the page builder, with an optional click-through URL. Needs Can Manage Pages.

• HQ → Settings → Design → Logo Settings — the four VA logos and the background images used on the login and registration pages. Needs Can Manage Design Settings.

• HQ → Settings → Design → Social Icons — Image and Image - Dark Mode for each icon. Needs Can Manage Design Settings.

• HQ → Staff — the Staff Avatar, which appears on the Phoenix team page. Needs Can Manage Staff.

• HQ → Rewards → Ranks — the Rank Icon. Needs Can Manage Ranks.

• HQ → Rewards → Badges — the Badge Icon. Needs Can Manage Badges.

• Operations → Fleet → Fleet and Operations → Fleet → Aircraft — the Image tab on each, with its Aircraft Image, Author / Attribution and LinkBack to the Image fields. Needs Can Manage Aircraft.

• Operations → Comms → NOTAMs — images embedded directly in the NOTAM content editor. Needs Can Manage NOTAMs, and the NOTAM module switched on for your VA.

Routes That Are Easy to Miss

• The NOTAM editor uploads images as attachments inside the notice body, so a staff member can put an image into vAMSYS without ever touching a field labelled Image.

• Activities can be created and updated through the Operations API as well as through Orwell, with the image supplied as a base64 data URI. An integration can put artwork into your VA without anyone opening an Orwell screen. The content rules are the same whichever route the image takes.

• Activity descriptions are the exception: inline attachments are disabled in that editor, so activity imagery only ever comes from the Image and Image dark fields.

• Pilots upload images too — a claim carries between one and five proof items, each either an uploaded image or a link, attached from the Manual PIREP / File a Claim action in the booking sidebar in Phoenix. The Acceptable Use Policy binds Pilots in exactly the same way it binds staff.

Uploads Are Publicly Reachable

The login and registration page is also the only public-facing surface a VA has. It can show the VA's logo, its rules and an image; everything else in a VA is accessible only to logged-in members. Your logos and background images are therefore the images most likely to be seen by someone outside your VA — and the ones worth checking first.

If Someone Objects to an Image

A third-party rights holder who wants content removed emails help@vamsys.co.uk with:

1. Their name and contact details.

2. The exact location of the content — a URL where possible, or the VA identifier plus a description of where the content appears.

3. A clear statement of why the content is unlawful or infringing, and of the right they say it breaches.

vAMSYS may then remove or disable the content, require changes, or suspend or terminate the account or the VA. The affected VA can submit a counter-statement to the same address, and content may be restored.

When You Are Not Sure

This page does not decide individual cases, and there is no pre-approval route — vAMSYS does not review images before they go up. If you are unsure about a specific image, read the Acceptable Use Policy, which is the authoritative document on acceptable use (the Terms of Service summarise those rules; the Acceptable Use Policy governs in full), and email help@vamsys.co.uk if you still need to raise it.

The safe default is short: if you cannot show that you have the right to use an image, do not upload it.

• Acceptable Use Policy

• Terms of Service

• Virtual Airline Owner Terms

Related

• Aircraft — the Author / Attribution and LinkBack fields, and the image cascade

• Branding — logos and login page background images

• Picture Board — banner images on the Phoenix dashboard

• NOTAMs — notices whose body can contain uploaded images

• Staff — staff avatars and the permissions listed above