FAQs

What kind of photos should I upload? 

We would love photos you have of signs, exhibits, placards, and text from areas administered by the National Park Service. This includes: National Parks, National Historic Sites, National Monuments, National Memorials, National Battlefields, National Trails, National Lakeshores, and other public lands.

Please make sure that your photo clearly shows the text and that the text is readable. 

Please do not upload photos with people in them. These photos will become part of a public photo collection, so we want to protect everyone’s privacy.  

If you accidentally submit a photo with people in it, we will likely exclude it from the public photo collection. The Save Our Signs project reserves the right to exclude any submitted images in the public photo collection that may violate privacy or otherwise be out of scope or inappropriate for this project.

What will you do with my photos? 

When you submit a photo via the form, you will see a note stating:  “I certify that I took this photo, or that I have permission from the person who took it to add it to this photo collection. Once I have submitted this photo here, it will have a CC0 1.0 public domain dedication and have no copyright.  It will also become part of this public data and photo collection and can be reused freely.”

This means that at soon as you submit your photo, it is in the public domain and can be reused freely. We will make the photos collected by September 17 publicly available by October 13, 2025. In addition, we may share the photo prior to Oct. 13 in order to promote this collaborative project. We will continue to accept photo submissions after September 17. Check out our Updates page for more information.

Will I be anonymous?

We will not collect or publish identifying information in the public photo collection such as names or other personal information. However, we cannot guarantee anonymity due to technical and/or legal factors outside of our control. The photos themselves might contain identifying information, such as EXIF data (exchangeable image file format). We are not deliberately collecting or sharing any personal data, but the file you upload may contain identifying information unless you remove it.

This data is being collected using an institutional license of Qualtrics. We are using Qualtrics because it does not require an email to upload photos.

I uploaded my photos!  What should I do next?

Check our our sister project, Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, and get involved in advocacy for our National Parks:

• Share the project with #SaveOurSigns on social media!  Tell your friends and family - we need everyone's help to build the photo collection.  

• Visit the National Parks Conservation Association site and learn about their advocacy efforts.

• Contact your representatives: tell them why the Parks are important and why we need to preserve our history.

• Donate to our project.

Why are you focused on only the National Park Service? What about the other units in the Department of the Interior?

Our current Save Our Signs project is focused on the National Park Service (NPS) because each NPS site has a unique congressionally mandated mission to describe the historical significance of that site. Although other Department of Interior sites, like the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, are also impacted by the public reporting and take down order, these sites don't have the same congressional mission and purpose, although they often also do interpretive work and signs. 

In addition, we have access to a list of publicly accessible NPS sites, but we have struggled to find similarly robust lists for other Department of Interior sites. We anticipate that data collection (and clean-up) would be very challenging without a standardized list of placenames for people to choose from. This challenge has limited the scope of what types of sites we can easily include. We are open to potentially expanding to other units in the Dept. of the Interior in the future if we can find a sustainable way to do so and/or partner with others to launch a "sister" project.

The National Park site where I took photos isn’t an option in the survey - why is this? 

The park name dropdown in the survey is a list of parks, monuments, and other sites derived from the Find a Park page of the NPS website. Some sites managed by or affiliated with NPS may not be included in this list.  If you believe a site is missing (and have sign photos you would like to send from that location), please contact us at saveoursigns@pm.me.