#in case some people are unsure how to tell a repost from an original artist or photographer posting their own work

[bogsleep]

a note about sources: when i reblog things that do not have a source or credit in the caption, it is because i have checked out the blog that originally posted it and determined that the OP appears to be the originator of the image (artist/photographer/maker). obviously i'm not perfect and sometimes my assessment is wrong or sometimes i don't check as well as i should, but if you ever see something i've reblogged that appears to have a questionable source feel free to send me an ask (or dm if we're mutuals).

how to identify stolen images: it is typically not very difficult to tell whether you are looking at the blog of an artist or photographer who posts their own work with no caption, or a reposter who uploads images taken from pinterest/reddit/instagram/other blogs without citing a source. blogs run by the artist or photographer will generally include the name of the creator as the blog title or url or in the description, or at the very least have a recognizable "digital identity" to which their work is attached. their work will also typically be consistent in style, technique, and subject matter. also many (though not all!) original artists/photographers will tag their original uploads of their work as "my work", "my art", "original photography", or something similar that implies creation of the image. most third party uploaders will either include very few tags solely for organization in order to preserve their aesthetic, OR tag with a big pile of buzzwords but generally avoid ones that directly claim authorship of the image. some will even add "artist credit" by putting the artist's name in the tags of the original post (not a good way to add credit btw since those don't carry over to reblogs and thus an image can circulate for years with no source, and also if the OP deactivates or tumblr breaks the original post view function again then the source is just gone forever). also the tags "found", "upload", "upl" etc (when combined with a post that lacks a source/artist credit) are often indicators that this is a stolen image pulled from somewhere else rather than an upload directly from the photographer or artist.

if you're still not sure whether a blog is being run by an artist or just a particularly choosy reposter who is maintaining a very consistent aesthetic/persona while posting other people's work with no source, save one of their images to your device and try reverse image searching using tineye, google reverse image search, or labnol (website that allows you to use google reverse image search on mobile, which google does not allow by default for some stupid reason). those all have different areas of expertise so if you have trouble with one, try the others. this is how i have found nearly all the artist credits i have added to other posts in my "source added" tag. sometimes you need to really investigate the results to find the original source. duplicate results does not always equal stolen - you may be able to find the same image posted by the same creator across multiple platforms (in which case you'd expect the digital identity of the poster to match across all those platforms) or it may have been stolen and posted elsewhere AFTER the original post you are looking at, but if you're seeing other instances of the same image being posted across the web that are older than the post you're looking at, and they don't appear to all be posted by the same person, you're probably looking at a stolen repost. this is especially true if the blog posting it is mostly faceless and/or posts things of an inconsistent style and subject matter. even photographers who remain intentionally faceless will still post a large number of similar-looking photos - photographers don't generally go out to take one photo and go home, they take a large number of photos in the same general area under the same lighting conditions, then sift through to edit and post the best ones. you should be able to discern some kind of generally unified sense of place from a photographer's portfolio.

of course these aren't hard-and-fast rules, just general patterns to look for if you care about identifying sources. thank you for coming to my ted talk