Submissions
Suroy.ph · open submissions
Send us the place you can’t stop thinking about.
We have spent years photographing this country from the air and the ground, and we still have not seen most of it. There are 7,641 islands. We need help.
If you have made a photograph or a video of somewhere in the Philippines that stayed with you, send it. We publish the ones that are good, credit you by name, and link wherever you want us to link. You keep your work. We just want to show it to people.
What we are looking for
- A real place in the Philippines, named exactly, that you went to yourself.
- Something in the frame that a stock photo of the same place would not have. The weather that day. The person who was there. The angle nobody bothers with.
- Drone work especially, if you fly.
- Moments over landmarks. We have all seen the landmark.
What we do not publish
- Images you did not take yourself.
- AI-generated images, at all. Not disclosed, not labelled, not as illustration. Everything on this site is a photograph of something that was actually there, and one exception ends that.
- Heavy composites. Color grading is fine and normal. Adding a sky, removing a building, or merging two scenes is not.
- Photographs where a child is the subject. See below.
What every submission needs
All ten. Anything missing comes back to you unread, which is nobody’s idea of fun.
- Your real name. The legal name of the person who made the work. This stays private unless it is also your credit name.
- The name you want credited. How you want it to appear on the page. A handle is fine.
- Contact details. Email, and a mobile or messaging handle if you would rather we reach you there.
- The exact location. Barangay and municipality at minimum. Coordinates if you have them, and if you flew it, you probably do.
- The date it was taken. The actual date, not roughly. Places change, and a dated frame stays honest years later.
- The original file. Straight off the camera or drone. Not a screenshot, not a social media download, not a compressed re-export. If it is over 25MB, send a Drive or Dropbox link.
- A short firsthand description. Three or four sentences, in your own words, about being there. What the light was doing. What went wrong. What somebody said to you. This is the part we cannot write for you, and it is usually the reason a submission gets published.
- Confirmation that it is yours. That you personally created it and hold the rights to it.
- Permission to publish and edit. That Suroy.ph may publish it with credit, and may crop, resize and color grade it to fit our layouts. We will not alter what the image shows.
- Disclosure of any AI or manipulation. If any part of the image was generated or significantly altered, say so. We will not publish it, but we would far rather know than find out.
If a child is identifiable in the frame
We do not publish photographs where a child is the subject, and no permission changes that.
Where a child is identifiable but incidental, a passer-by on a beach, a face in a crowd, we need written permission from their parent or guardian before it runs, naming the child and the photograph. If you cannot get that, send us a different frame, or one where they are not identifiable. We will not publish it on a maybe.
What you get, plainly
We do not pay for submissions. We would rather say that on this page than let you find out after you have sent something. What you get is a credit with your name, a link to wherever you want to send people, and your work in front of an audience of a couple of hundred thousand.
Your work stays yours. You are giving us permission to publish it, not ownership of it. Post it wherever else you like, before or after. We ask for nothing exclusive.
We will not promise a reply by a certain day. This is a small operation, and a deadline we cannot keep is worse than no deadline. What we will do is tell you either way once we have looked. If we publish, we will send you the link before it goes out.
Every feature is chosen on the photograph. Not on your following, not on your gear, not on whether we have heard of you. We have published frames shot on a phone and turned down frames shot on cameras worth more than a car. The picture is the whole argument.
How to send it
Fill this in and send it. It takes a few minutes if you have the details to hand, and every field below is one we genuinely need in order to publish you properly.
If the form gives you trouble, email submissions@suroy.ph with the same details and put the location in the subject line.