The rule
If an image shows a real place, a real person, or a real species, it is either a genuine photograph or it says plainly that it is not. There is no quiet middle ground where an illustration passes as evidence of what a place looks like.
Sources matter
Every image says what it is.
A guide that fakes its photographs is not worth trusting on anything else. Documentary images get licensed and credited. Generated interpretation gets labelled as interpretation, every time.
On the history page
The three images there, the Missoula flood, the basalt sand, and the Columbia Basin Project, are generated historical interpretation, and each carries a caption saying so. No photograph exists of an Ice Age flood, which is rather the point of that section.
Named places get real imagery
The dunes, the Yellow Zone, the Mud Flats, and the lake shoreline are specific places with specific appearances. Where documentary photography or official imagery is available for them, that is what gets used, and a picture of some other dune field standing in is not acceptable however good it looks.
Video references are not publishable
Frames from videos shared with us guide art direction and fact-checking. They are not published without permission from whoever shot them.
One image, one job
A photograph serves the purpose it was chosen for rather than being reused across unrelated sections to fill space, and the build fails if a page hero is repeated anywhere else on the site.
Credits travel with the file
Source, creator, licence, and any modification are recorded before an image ships. Where a file has been resized or recompressed for the web, the untouched original is kept alongside it.
Corrections
If you hold rights to an image used here, or you can show something is credited wrongly, write to michael@duneguideusa.com and it gets fixed or removed.
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