peter martin

aodine:

spaceminer:

Let’s encourage proper photo credits as an internet norm, starting here and now.

I love Tumblr. Since joining in January, I’ve only enjoyed it more and more, as I’ve discovered funny, beautiful, intelligent, and heart-warming tumblelogs.

But there’s this one thing.

While the great quotes I come across here are almost always attributed to their source, photographs are almost always NOT. During my time at JPG I worked with thousands of photographers and learned what a struggle the industry really is.

We obviously aren’t paying photographers for use of their images on our blogs, so isn’t direct attribution with the photographer’s name (in addition to linking to the source) the least we could do?

I wonder if part of this has to do with the way the content submission boxes are set up.

Add a Quote (with mention of “Source”)

Upload a Photo (with mention of “Caption,” not “Source”)

I’ve sent the following message to the Tumblr staff:

Hello! You guys rock and I love your website. Thanks for your hard work making it.

I have a request. I understand that when you designed the “Add a Photo” prompt, you were mostly considering users uploading their own photos. However, it seems now that most people use that tool to post other people’s photos from around the web.

This is great and all, but I wonder if you could alter the text slightly to encourage members to credit the photographer when posting. Maybe it could simply say “Caption and/or Source (optional)” or if you really were into it, you could create another prompt for “Photographer Name (optional).” It’s funny how big of an effect little things like this can have on internet norms.

Thanks for considering.

LBM, spaceminer.tumblr.com

If you are a photographer or care about someone who is, consider pasting that message to Tumblr support, reblogging, spreading the word, or just reconsidering your own captioning to include photo credit. Thanks!

Example of an image with photo credit:

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Fully support this.