What kind of photos should I upload? 

• Photos of interpretive signs, exhibits, or text from areas administered by the National Park Service.

  • • For example, 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.

Who can submit photos?

Anyone can submit a photo of a sign or placard with the submission form. This is a community project with user-submitted information. We cannot guarantee that entries are accurate or complete, but we will do our best to edit entries for clarity.  

Will I be anonymous?

• • • We will not deliberately publish identifying information in the public photo collection, such as your name or email. However, we cannot guarantee anonymity due to technical and/or legal factors outside of our control. 

    • Photo uploads are collected using an institutional license of Qualtrics.  We are using Qualtrics because it does not require an email to upload photos.

    • The original photos volunteers uploaded might contain identifying information, such as EXIF data (exchangeable image file format). We are not deliberately collecting or sharing personal data, but the file you upload may contain identifying information unless you remove it. We will remove EXIF data (except photo orientation) prior to adding the photographs to the public SOS Archive page. 

    • Since these are photos of signs in public locations, we are extracting location data prior to EXIF removal, when available.  After review, it may be included in future photo releases. If you are concerned about the location embedded in your photos being sensitive, please remove it prior to submitting to this project.

    • To learn more about metadata in photos, see this guide from the University of Michigan.

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.  

What content is included in the SOS Archive?

• The SOS Archive is an online collection of crowdsourced photos submitted to SOS.  The photos are organized by NPS site.

• A downloadable spreadsheet houses volunteer-provided details for each individual photo submission. In addition to the name of the park, these details include the date that the photo was taken, and may include the title of the sign, if it was submitted by the volunteer. Since this information came from volunteers all over the country, the Save Our Signs team is not able to independently verify dates and locations.

• As of October 13, 2025, this collection includes photos that were submitted to Save Our Signs prior to September 24.  We continue to accept photo submissions.  Photos received after September 24 will be released at a later date.  See the Project Updates page for more info.  

Which photo submissions did you not include in the SOS Archive, and why?

• • • Photos with identifiable people in them:  To protect the privacy of park visitors, we have not released photos that contained images of identifiable people. We may add these photos to our collection in the future if we are able to crop identifiable people out of these images.  

    • Photos from non-NPS sites:  The focus of our project has been on sites and signs managed by NPS. We may have excluded photos if it was clear that they were taken in sites not primarily managed by NPS. For example, we have not included photos from Topaz Relocation Center because while it is designated a National Historic Landmark, it is managed by the Topaz Museum, an independent organization, not the NPS. Management of federally designated sites can be quite complex and is sometimes split between multiple entities, including local government and independent organizations.

    • Photos without signs:  We did not include photos that are not of signs.  If you submitted photos of brochures, gift shops, etc., we have saved those for later.  We may be able to release these photos in the future if we are able to expand our team’s capacity. 

    • Screenshots or other non-photograph images:  We currently cannot accept images that are not your personal photographs that you are free to give to the public domain.  

    • Photos submitted after September 24:  If you submitted your photos after September 24, then they will be included in a future photo release.  See the Project Updates page for the latest info. 

Do you edit the photos that are submitted? 

• • • We convert all file types to JPEGs and create thumbnail versions for the photo viewer interface.

    • We crop out identifiable people in photos when possible, or exclude the image from the collection if the person can not be cropped out.

    • We are not otherwise editing the photos.

Do you edit the information about the photos?  (AKA the metadata)

• • • We fix minor typos in the sign title and additional notes fields.

    • We remove personally identifying and off-topic comments.

    • At this time, we are not releasing any additional notes that a volunteer may have submitted, because they will require more time to review and ensure privacy.  The additional notes data may be released at a future date.

    • We remove EXIF data (exchangeable image file format) from the photos, which is potentially identifying and extraneous metadata that may have originally been embedded in photo submissions.  This information includes things like phone model, camera settings, etc.  We retain the orientation data for the photos, and location data, as outlined below. 

    • Since these are photos of signs in public locations, we are extracting location data prior to EXIF removal, when available.  After review, it may be included in future photo releases. If you are concerned about the location embedded in your photos being sensitive, please remove it prior to submitting to this 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.

What about National Park Service websites?  Are those being preserved?

• • • We are not accepting screenshots of NPS websites for this project.  The Data Rescue Project is working on ensuring that the NPS websites are preserved.  Many NPS pages are already preserved in the Wayback Machine. 

Are you still collecting photos?

• • • While the initial crowdsourcing effort was originally given an end date of September 17, 2025, with increasing reports of NPS interpretive signs that have been flagged for removal or removed altogether, SOS will continue to accept photo submissions for the foreseeable future. 

    • Any photos received after September 24 will be released at a later date. See the Project Updates page for more information. 

I uploaded my photos!  What should I do next?

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

• Check our our sister project, Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian.

• 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.

When will the next set of photos be added to the SOS Archive?

• We will be periodically adding photos to the collection as they continue to be submitted by volunteers.  We are still determining what that workflow and timing will look like.  See the Project Updates page for the latest info.