Ipernity is a non-commercial photo sharing community which is financed exclusively by membership dues without any intention of making a profit.
[6] Ipernity originated in 2005, when the two French programmers Christophe Ruelle and Christian Conti set about programming a photo sharing platform.
On January 10, 2017, the idea was born to found a non-profit organization — the Ipernity Members Association (ima) — in order to continue to operate the website on their own initiative.
[21] In December 2018, after an announcement on October 26,[22] Ipernity deleted 5.8 million files, for a total of 14.6 TB, from free accounts which went over the storage limits and therefore had "invisible content".
[24] As a high-performance application in the desktop arena, Ipernity focuses on photographers, enthusiasts, artists, writers and semi-professional users.
The community enables the exchange of images, videos, audio files and blogs, as well as the associated communication and global online publishing, with the aim of promoting dialogue and mutual inspiration.
[29] In addition to the uploading of images with titles, captions and metadata information, features include posting and receiving comments, use of an internal mailbox, options for customising one's page layout, geo-mapping, embedding of notes and pictures, publication of articles or blogs, uploading of videos and audio files, editing and replacing of one's own photos, downloading (depending on the permission granted by the copyright owner), participation in and establishment of thematic groups, and use of an integrated automatic translation feature that provides translations to and from eleven different languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Japanese and Chinese.
In deciding under what kind of licence one wishes to publish a specific content, the user may choose from a wide range of options, from all rights reserved to free use.
These options allow users to tailor their Ipernity account to their specific sharing needs and to the degree of privacy and copyright protection they desire.
[33] This means that, unlike users of commercial online photo exchange platforms, Ipernity members have a say on any changes of direction, modification of policies, and the planning of future developments.