Privacy notice

This notice explains what personal data Imaggeo collects when you visit the site, browse the database, create an account or submit an image or video, why we collect it, how long we keep it, who we share it with, and the rights you have over it. Imaggeo is the online geosciences image and video repository of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).

Last updated: 17 July 2026.

Who is responsible for your data

The data controller responsible for the processing described here is:

For any question about this notice, or to exercise your rights, contact our data protection team at privacy@egu.eu.

What personal data we collect, and why

Account and profile

When you register we store your username, email address, name and a securely hashed password so that you can sign in and we can contact you about your account and your submissions. Your profile can also hold optional details you choose to add: your affiliation, city, country and an avatar image. If you sign in through a third-party account (Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, X) instead, we store the profile information those providers return (such as your name and email address) and the access tokens needed to complete the sign-in.

Two-factor authentication is optional. If you turn it on, we store, in encrypted form, the secret your authenticator app uses to generate sign-in codes and the recovery codes that let you sign in if you lose that app. You can turn it off again at any time from your account settings, which deletes that data.

Images, videos and their metadata

When you submit media we store the file itself together with the title, description and alt text, an optional capture location shown as a single point on a map, the capture date, and technical details read from the file such as the camera brand and model, lens, exposure settings and dimensions.

We minimise what the stored file exposes: on upload we read the technical metadata into separate database fields and then strip the embedded metadata from the file itself, so images keep only their orientation and colour profile and videos are re-saved without embedded tags. Any precise coordinates survive only as the single map point you can edit or remove, and the original file name, which can contain personal information, is cleared once the item is published.

If you consent when submitting, your profile details (name, and any affiliation, city, country and avatar) are published alongside your media as the author credit. Published media is distributed under a Creative Commons licence; see the copyright section of the FAQ for what that means.

When a published item is later edited, we keep a history of what changed and when, and whether the change was made by you, by our staff, or automatically. This edit history is included in your data export.

Comments, likes, favourites, collections and follows

If you comment, we store the comment text and the time it was posted; we do not store an IP address with comments. Likes record a keyed, one-way hash of your IP address (never the address itself) together with a session identifier so that a like can be toggled; anonymous likes are allowed. Favouriting an image or following another member records that relationship so we can show it back to you. Your favourites are private to you unless you turn on the option to show them on your public profile, in which case anyone, including people without an account, can see every image you have favourited; you can turn that off again at any time.

You can also group images into named collections, each with an optional description. A collection is private to you unless you choose to make it public; a public collection, including its description, can be seen by anyone on the internet, including people without an account, from your public profile. Making a collection public is always your own choice, and you can make it private again at any time.

Photo competition entries and votes

If you take part in a photo competition as a voter, we collect the name, email address and EGU identifier you provide with your vote. This information is collected only to prevent voter fraud and is cleared shortly after the competition ends. Judges and their reviews are recorded against their accounts.

Technical logs

Our web servers keep access logs that record the requesting IP address, the browser and operating system, the page requested and the time of the request. We use these logs to keep the service running securely and to detect and prevent abuse, and we prune them regularly.

Cookies and analytics

We keep cookies to a minimum. Anonymous browsing needs no cookie at all; a session cookie is set only when it is needed, for example when you sign in or like an image. We also use a cookie to protect forms against cross-site request forgery and a short-lived cookie to carry one-off status messages. Your light or dark theme preference is stored in your browser's local storage, not in a cookie.

For audience measurement we run our own self-hosted Matomo analytics. It sets no analytics cookies and anonymises each visitor's IP address the moment it is received, discarding the last two bytes so that no full address is stored. It records only the referrer host or type, and analytics data is kept for 90 days. This configuration follows the guidance of the French data protection authority (CNIL) for consent-exempt analytics. A fallback pixel still counts the visit when JavaScript is disabled, subject to the same immediate IP anonymisation.

Legal bases for processing

• Consent (Article 6(1)(a) GDPR): creating an account and publishing your profile details, submitting media, and entering a photo competition. You can withdraw consent at any time.
• Performance of a contract (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR): operating the account you have asked us to provide.
• Legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR): keeping the service secure and reliable, preventing abuse, keeping server access logs, and measuring audience with cookieless analytics.

Who we share your data with

We do not sell your personal data. Content you publish is openly available under its Creative Commons licence and may be downloaded and reused worldwide. In running the service, data may reach the following recipients:

• Analytics and anti-abuse: our self-hosted Matomo analytics and a self-hosted proof-of-work challenge (mCaptcha) shown on the sign-up and report forms, both run on EGU infrastructure.
• Map providers: when a map is shown, your browser loads map tiles directly from OpenStreetMap, OpenTopoMap or Esri (ArcGIS), which therefore receive your IP address.
• Social sign-in providers: if you choose social login, your chosen provider (Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, X) processes the sign-in.
• Email delivery: to send account and notification messages.
• Security monitoring: automated content-security-policy violation reports are sent to a monitoring service; embedding of Imaggeo pages is permitted for the EGU virtual meeting platform (Gather, gather.town).

International transfers

Some of these recipients are based outside the European Economic Area. Where such a transfer happens only because you chose to use that feature, for example social sign-in with a US-based provider or the Esri (ArcGIS) map layer, we rely on your consent or on the transfer being necessary to provide the feature you asked for (Article 49(1)(a) and (b) GDPR). Where EGU itself engages a processor outside the European Economic Area, we rely on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, a copy of which you can request from privacy@egu.eu.

How long we keep your data

• Your account and any media you publish are kept while your account is open. Published images remain online under their Creative Commons licence, with your name as the required attribution together with any affiliation, city, country or avatar you chose to keep published, even after you close your account.
• Media you upload but leave with incomplete details is automatically deleted after about 180 days; a finished draft you never publish is kept while your account is open and removed when you close it.
• Your favourites, collections and the list of people you follow are kept while your account is open and are removed when you close it; a collection you had made public stops being visible at that point.
• Anonymous likes are removed after about a year.
• Aggregated view statistics are anonymous; the underlying counters roll up after about 90 days.
• Sign-in sessions expire when you close your browser and are cleared regularly; the short-lived fingerprint used to de-duplicate view counts is discarded within an hour.
• An account that has never published an image and has been inactive for a long time may be warned and then closed after a grace period.
• Photo competition vote records are collected only to prevent voter fraud and are cleared shortly after the competition ends.
• Server access logs are kept only for security and troubleshooting, and are pruned regularly.

We keep regular, encrypted backups in multiple data centres within the European Economic Area, each with its own retention period. Backups let us restore the service after a failure; when we delete your data from our live systems it is removed from these backups as they are rotated out.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to access your data, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to its processing, to data portability, and to withdraw consent at any time. No decision producing legal effects concerning you, or similarly significantly affecting you, is made about you solely by automated means.

You can exercise the main rights directly:

• When signed in, download a copy of your data as a machine-readable file.
• When signed in, close your account to withdraw consent and have your personal data removed.
• Or contact privacy@egu.eu for any of these requests.

When you close your account, media you have already published stays online under its Creative Commons licence with your name as the required attribution; the rest of your personal data, including your contact details and any optional profile information, is deleted. Any comments you posted are deleted or kept with your name removed, whichever you choose at closure.

If you signed in with a social account, closing your account removes the link and the stored sign-in tokens on our side. To fully revoke access you should also remove Imaggeo from that provider's connected-applications settings, as we cannot cancel the permission you granted there.

How we protect your data

Traffic to the site is encrypted with TLS, passwords are stored only as secure hashes, any two-factor authentication secrets and recovery codes are stored encrypted, and IP addresses used for engagement features are stored only as keyed one-way hashes rather than in the clear. Location and camera metadata is stripped from stored media files as described above. Our administrators can access account and content data where that is necessary to operate, support or moderate the service, and only for those purposes.

Complaints

You have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority. As EGU is based in Munich, the competent authority is the Bavarian State Office for Data Protection Supervision (Bayerisches Landesamt für Datenschutzaufsicht, BayLDA). You may also contact the supervisory authority in your country of residence.

Changes to this notice

We may update this notice from time to time. The date shown at the top reflects the latest version.

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