Image policy & takedown

Builder images

Granted. Logos and photographs a builder sends us, each recorded with who granted it, when, and how. These can appear anywhere a builder is listed.

From the builder’s own website. To identify a builder, we show its logo or site icon, a small labelled screenshot of its homepage, and the image its site chooses for link previews. Each is fetched from the builder’s own site, stored here rather than linked, dated, and shown only on that builder’s own profile, its row in our lists and its share card. We read each site’s robots.txt first and skip any site that asks not to be fetched. We do not copy photographs from builder websites.

Place images

City, county and metro pages may show aerial imagery from public-domain government sources, openly licensed photographs of the place itself, and public-domain historical images such as the Library of Congress’s nineteenth-century bird’s-eye views. They are never presented as a builder’s work. No picture carries a caption: where a licence asks for a credit, the credit is printed in the footer of the page that shows it and listed in full on photo credits.

City, township and county marks. To identify a place on pages about it, in our lists of places and on its share card, we show the place’s own public emblem: its logo, its website icon, or, where the place identifies itself on its own website with its seal, that seal. We use it only to say which place a page is about, never to suggest that the place endorses us or anyone we list. Each mark is fetched only from the place’s own official website, stored here rather than linked, dated, and reviewed by a person before it appears. Our crawler reads each site’s robots.txt first and respects any refusal; where a place’s site turns crawlers away, a person saved the mark from that official site in a browser, and its record says so. The small square version used in lists and filter chips may instead be the profile picture of the place’s own social media account, but only when the place’s website links to that account and the picture shows the same emblem the website does. It is saved in a browser, never by our crawler, and its record names the linking page and the account. Where a place publishes no square version at all, the square is cut from its own logo: only the emblem part, otherwise unchanged, and the record says it was cut.

Lifestyle photography

Many pages open with an image of a home, a room or a setting — a house at dusk, a lake shore, a kitchen, a house going up — to show what the page is about. It illustrates the subject; it is not a photograph of any listed builder’s work, and it is not a particular home in the city the page is about. These images come from licensed libraries (Pexels) and from our own camera, and some are generated with an image model. A generated image is not a photograph: it illustrates a setting and never stands for a real house, and it never appears as a city’s own picture or on a builder’s page. The full list, with each source and licence, is below. Where a licence asks for a credit, the credit is printed in the page footer rather than beside the picture.

Our own photographs

Some photographs are ours: homes on the Parade of Homes tour, shot by us from the street or inside homes open to the public. Where the builder may be named, the photograph appears on that builder's profile with a note saying who built it and which tour entry it was, and it may also illustrate a room or a city elsewhere on the site; no caption is printed beside it there, and our credits page names whose house it is. Where the builder may not be named, it runs unattributed as an illustration, and who built it stays in our records only.

Editing

Any image here may be edited, retouched, extended, composited, upscaled or enhanced, by any means, including generative tools; some lifestyle images are generated outright. Each record says so. The one constraint: a house shown on a builder’s profile, or credited to a builder anywhere, is a real house that builder built, photographed by us or sent by the builder. Retouching it (straightening, cropping out a sign, a car or a grey sky) never changes the house itself. Lifestyle and section images carry no such constraint.

These photographs appear only as the opening image of the home page, an index, guide or Parade of Homes page, a city or county page, or a city’s remodeling or build-type page, and as the small image on each service on the remodeling page. They never appear on a builder’s profile, in a list of builders or on a builder’s share card.

What we never use

Photos from Google Business Profiles or Google Maps, images from paradeofhomes.org or Housing First Minnesota, listing or MLS photos, and stock, generated or other builders’ houses on a builder’s profile or credited to a builder.

Takedown requests

If you are a builder, a city, township or county, a photographer or a rights holder and want an image removed, email hello@homebuildersmn.com with the page address. We remove builder and place images with a single switch and redeploy, usually within two business days, and we do not ask you to justify the request.