Recently I received an email from the creator of one of the images I use here, asking me to take it down. I did so, immediately, and replied with an apology, to which he responded generously.
I assume it's true of more bloggers than me: images are so freely available online (I use google images, searching based on whatever word or phrase I think might be fruitful) that we forget they have authors. Drag, drop, done. There was a time I'd put some sort of attribution under the image, but over time I got lazy. Nor would such attribution always be satisfactory, I'd guess.
Because my readership is somewhere south of HuffPo or The Dish, I implicitly relied on anonymity. Hearing from the artist was, therefore, a surprise, and a reminder I need to be more careful. I enjoy the process of looking for and selecting the perfect title images for my posts: I amuse myself with visual pun-itry, congratulate myself on my wit. (And why shouldn't I? No one else does!)
Bad habits being hard to break, and good ones hard to maintain, it might take a while to be consistent; but I'll try to resume applying attribution for those images not clearly in the public domain, or whose origins aren't self-evident. Meanwhile, I apologize to any and all talented people whose work I've appropriated here. All I can say is I haven't meant to offend, and I make zero profit from it.
[Image from here. Not sure that's the original source, however.]
