How to get your custom bike on Bike EXIF and Pipeburn

Bike EXIF, Pipeburn, Return of the Cafe Racers and BikeBound all take submissions directly from whoever built the bike, through a form or an email, and none of the four submission pages asks for a fee. What gets a build through is the photography and the fact that nobody has seen the bike yet. Bike EXIF spells it out: landscape images only, because "vertical images cannot be used", at least 2500 pixels wide, "well-lit magazine-style shots taken with a DSLR camera and a reasonably long lens", sent through WeTransfer or Dropbox with the batch kept under 500MB. It will not run photos from compact cameras, raked-out choppers, or bikes already published elsewhere, and it says it gets too many submissions a day to guarantee a reply.

What each of the four sites asks for

Pipeburn uses a form that wants your name, email, the type or model of bike, your country, a description and at least one image, or you can write to mail@pipeburn.com. Accepted files are jpg, png, gif, jpeg and pdf, with a maximum file size of 30MB, and the site says it usually will not post bikes that have already been shown on other sites. It puts its reach at 300,000 unique site visitors a month.

Return of the Cafe Racers is the most demanding on pictures. It asks for at least 8 to 10 professional photographs showing both sides of the bike and close-up details, and warns that blurry, badly exposed or heavily filtered images are unlikely to be used. The written side matters too: make, model and year, the concept in around 150 words, how the bike rides now, the paint inspiration, and a parts list broken up by category.

BikeBound is the most relaxed. Email them with your name, location, the make, model and year of the donor, a nickname if the bike has one, and a description, plus sample photos. It welcomes bobbers, trackers, café racers, streetfighters, scramblers, choppers, motards and brat builds, shop-built or yard-built, and says it simply wants bikes that get ridden.

What this means if you are building in India

Indian workshops clear this bar regularly. Bike EXIF ran Buraq Motorcycles of Hyderabad on 23 January 2026 with a Royal Enfield Guerrilla 450 café racer that uses a trellised custom subframe, Yamaha R1 forks, a BMW R 1250 GS steering damper, a PowerTRONIC ECU and a stainless exhaust with a titanium Arrow muffler, and took silver at Royal Enfield's Busted Knuckles Build-Off. The photographer, Affan Intekhab, is credited in the feature, which tells you how these sites treat images.

So the practical order of work for an Indian builder is this. Finish the bike, then shoot it properly before you post anything, because the first Instagram reveal can cost you the feature at both Bike EXIF and Pipeburn. Budget for a photographer with a DSLR and a long lens and shoot in daylight against a clean background, landscape, at full resolution. Write the parts list as you build, not from memory. Then send one clean submission to one site at a time.

One warning. A feature puts your bike in front of a large audience, including the people who enforce the rules. Section 52(1) of the Motor Vehicles Act says no owner shall alter a vehicle so that the particulars in the certificate of registration are at variance with those originally specified by the manufacturer, and alterations need the registering authority's approval. A hand-built subframe, a different engine or a louder exhaust is not harmless because a magazine liked it. Get the paperwork sorted on a bike you intend to ride on the road.

Sources

• Bike EXIF: Submit your motorcycle
• Pipeburn: Submit a bike
• Return of the Cafe Racers: Submit your cafe racer project
• BikeBound: Submit a bike
• Bike EXIF: Hit and Run, a Royal Enfield Guerrilla 450 café racer from India
• Section 52, Motor Vehicles Act 1988