Do you REALLY need credit for that image you found on the web?

People are getting very upset over how other people are resharing photos that they originally uploaded to their social network. To you and I this would sound like a legit reason to become angry, the thing is though, it’s not their image.

We all can relate to feeling like the social network we use is ours and ours only as it acts like a stage to our audience whether public or not. We have advanced from simply uploading just the photos that we take and have cleverly decided to start searching for images on the web to share.

This is great, we all get to visually see what someone somewhere took a picture of, except that there are more people getting upset when others don’t tag them, hat tip them or retweet them directly and give THEM the credit for finding a photo that you could find on the web, well, in fact you did, it just happened to be through them.

So what?

The Internet is a public forum, that means even the photo’s you take and upload online can be stolen and created into a meme or simply shared somewhere else with no credit given, just pop over to Reddit to see some images taken from Facebook. Is this stealing? In a way, yes, especially if it is actually a photo you took, but since the Internet truly has no rules or regulations how can we put an end to all of that? I suppose, in this case we could stop adding our personal photos to the Internet. Will we? No.

This does not mean that I condone stealing, I am simply pointing out the fact that the Internet is one big stash of shared content that we search and find and then share to our online communities in the hopes that they will…share. So why are people getting upset if others share something that was meant to be shared in the first place? Is it because they removed you on Facebook as the original person who posted it? Or that they didn’t in some way notify their social community that you were the person who brought this almighty picture into their presence (especially if the sharer gets more of a reaction than the original person who shared it.)

Now on Facebook and G+, when you share and do not remove the tag of the person, no matter how many ways it is shared it will look like it was shared from the original post, however other social sites do not do this or have options for you to notify your community.

To sum it all up, if you found a picture on the web… it is not yours, you don’t deserve credit and causing an argument on the web doesn’t make the whole situation any better. If someone who shared your found web image and gained more reactions than you, it either has to do with the preference of the audience you shared it with or the time of day you originally shared it, but it is still not your image.

The next time you think of wanting credit for just adding a random photo from the Internet, ask yourself, do I REALLY need credit for that image I found on the web?