Photographers know it. If you post your work on a website like Flickr or 500px, chances are that it will be shared on social networks. This is great, of course, unless sharers “forget” to give credit where credit is due or try to claim ownership of the shots.
Paulo Ordoveza wants to change the state of things. He recently launched @PicPedant, a Twitter account that catches culprits, calls them out publicly, and links to the proper sources.
Here are two examples below:
.@coolearthpix Specifically Kayangan Lake, Coron Island, Palawan Province (not Palawan Island). Photo by @13thfool: http://t.co/b70e9Ju8Aa
— PicPedant (@PicPedant) February 17, 2014
.@EarthBeauties “Above the sky” by Andrew Vasiliev http://t.co/roVr57gom9
— PicPedant (@PicPedant) February 16, 2014
Ordoveza explains how everything started on his personal blog:
There’s a certain class of Twitter users who post nothing but pictures, calling themselves names like “HistoryPics”, “EarthPix”, “SpacePorn”, and such. They’ve been popping up a lot lately, posting photos (and Photoshops), minimally captioned and rarely attributed, duplicating each other to extend coverage, or spawning copycats. […] This annoyed me, so I started @PicPedant on a lark. Late on a Friday afternoon, PicPedant replied to pic accounts with cursory corrections, attributions, and links to original photographers and artists. It took little more than simple reverse image searches and a little extra hunting, harking back to my days debunking Filipino urban legends with my old site “Pula.ph.”
Ordoveza does a remarkable job hunting down those culprits and correcting them. What do you think?
