Forum:Actor pictures

Forum: The Situation Room > Actor pictures

Over the last while, I've been creating brief actor pages in order to keep the wanted page count low. Creating these ever-so-brief pages takes me all of 45 seconds, resulting from a quick scan of their IMDb profile (name, birthdate/place, 3 or 4 appearances). I haven't exactly bothered to add biographical information. I sort of have to fulfill my guilty conscience of not having more thorough actor pages, so I present a question: Is it OK to use the screengrab of the character that the actor is portraying in order to use them within their actor page? I'm quite aware of the converse, that images of the actors cannot be used in their respective character page (we've encountered a number of situations where "that's just Kiefer Sutherland in another role or a Kiefer Sutherland promo picture, and not Kiefer Sutherland playing Jack Bauer"). So yeah, main question: is a picture of Kiefer Sutherland/Kim Raver/other actor playing Jack Bauer/Audrey Raines/other character all right to place on that actor's page?

Postscript: If you take a look at my contributions, you'll see that my image uploads are very minimal. So you'll see that it's not exactly my preference to upload more pictures than necessary. --Deege515 03:33, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

I personally don't see a problem with it. A picture of Jack Bauer is also a picture of Kiefer Sutherland, although the reverse is not true. Memory Alpha does this a lot. I'd think ideally, we'd prefer to eventually have out-of-character pics for every actor, but using a 24 screengrab as a placeholder should be fine. --Proudhug 09:25, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

See Forum:Images for more on this topic.

I'd like to bring this topic up again. I've recently begun to dislike our practice of using non-24 pictures for our actors. This seems especially inappropriate in cases like with Kett Turton whose pic is of him from another show. If we're going to show him in a screencap, doesn't it make more sense to use one from our show? This also extends to 24 crew members. A lot of the crew have made appearances in DVD special features, web specials, etc. and I think it'd be preferable to include screencaps from those things rather than IMDb pics, when possible. If no one has any objections, I'm going to start cracking down on non-24 "real person" images, and hopefully ideally we can replace the existing ones with 24 screencaps. --Proudhug 19:42, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

So let me get this right so I know for future actor pages - you dont want any pictures of actors at e.g. red carpet events/any public appearances, you only want them from 24 episodes/DVD special features? SignorSimon 15:46, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Ideally, yeah. Unless someone has any reason to object. I'm not gonna worry too much about cracking down hard or anything, but it seems to me to be a good practice to start. There may be other 24-related images available, too, such as pics from panel discussions, conventions, etc. I just think we should stick as close to 24 as possible with everything. --Proudhug 16:07, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

OK, I just thought it would be useful to know. So if we cant find images of the person from a 24 related event, we just use the image of the character? SignorSimon 16:25, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

This would be ideal, I agree. But the practical issue that comes up is, 24-related OOU pics of a ton of the minor character actors just don't exist. And there is nothing more boring or disappointing than reading the article about CharacterX and then clicking his actor page... only to find the same exact picture there. To keep it interesting, we shouldn't really shy from red-carpet pics and the like, assuming a 24-related OOU pic doesn't come up. Look at the actor pic for Matt Bushell: it's clearly not 24-related but I couldn't find a pic of Bushell "on the set" or doing 24-interviews, so why would we delete a great pic of the actor himself only to regress to recycling the same old character pic? The same can be said for a huge number of minor characters. (I have no problem with using IU pics for actor pages as placeholders, as this is generally the only option left to those people who cannot/will not upload pics when creating actor pages). – Blue Rook 03:57, 24 December 2007 (UTC)_talkcontribs

Seriously, there's nothing more boring or disappointing? The goal of Wiki 24 isn't to make things interesting, it's to be factual. Including a picture of a character on an actor page is still presenting an accurate photo of that actor, it's showing them at work, and more importantly, it's relevant to 24. Plus, the practicality of doing this is that by only using Fox images, we always know where the image came from and who the copyright holder is. It seems to me that "stealing" pics from IMDb or some other source undermines our recent efforts to properly tag and organize our image database. --Proudhug 02:58, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Crap, I didn't see this moved here. To respond, what if I made another fair-use tag exclusively for those images from IMDB. It would preclude any necessity to go and undo (and then delete) all those actor pic uploads and then recycle the same stuff again. Actor pages on wikis seem like a fair place to use pics like that, and I don't see any reason to undo all that work for any reason other than the eventuality that we get sued by an actors' guild or something. – Blue Rook 09:09, 6 January 2008 (UTC)_talkcontribs

Much like with the new stringent rules on image names, I'm not concerned with making an effort to change all of the old pics right now, mainly just throwing out a "from now on" thing. It's not something that I'm extremely worried about, but it just seems to me that, since this is a wiki about 24, it would be silly to chose a non-24-related image over an actual pic of the actor working on the show, interesting or not. I haven't been able to find any documentation of this, but I'm pretty sure this is MA's thinking on the matter, too. --Proudhug 22:14, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Ah I gotcha. Yes, I definitely agree that 24-related actor images (on the set, interviews, etc.) are better than those pics which are non-24-related. Since this is a non-retrospective policy change you're putting forward, it sits much better with me for obvious reasons, so to be clear, I'm with it 100%. I'm assuming that this means: if an actor page has a non-24-related image, it will suffice until and if a 24-related one comes along. For those which do not wind up with such a replacement image, don't you agree that a Fairuse Template would do well? If you do, I'd like to ask in advance for some ideas on the wording for it, but once we get the phrase right, I'll do plug them into those images like I have been doing with the IU screenshots. I'm thinking something like This image is a copyrighted promotional photo of an actor. As such, the copyright for it is most likely owned by the actor or their agent....– Blue Rook 08:30, 8 January 2008 (UTC)_talkcontribs