How to Credit Stock

Jun 22, 20143 min read

Deviation Actions

Published: Jun 22, 2014

4.9K Views

Recently I've seen a lot photo-manipulations where the resources used have been listed in a slightly slap-dash fashion. Things like "Resources by fuguestock" or simply pasting my icon at the bottom of the comments. Now I'm glad to be shown what artists have done with my photos, but I do ask in my guidelines (as do most stockists) that you paste a link to the image used in the comments. This is really quite important to me.

Good examples:

Iceberg fuguestock.deviantart.com/art/… by fuguestock

or

Iceberg 07 - Hole Close Up by fuguestock

(: devNAME : will display a deviants name and : iconNAME : will display their icon if you remove the spaces between the colons.)

There are a few reasons us stock artists ask to be attributed like this, but really its the first that concerns me most:

It makes it easy for other artists to see an element they like in your picture, and quickly find out where they can get it (which helps the stockist and other artists).
It makes it easy to tell if you are using legitimate resources (which helps you).
People can quickly see your level of skill by seeing how you have transformed the original image (which helps you).

How to credit stockist QUICKLY and EASILY

One of the reasons people do not credit resources properly is that it is actually quite a hassle making a list of stockists and their pictures after you post a piece of art. It's a virtually impossible task to track down the links for all the images you've used after the fact. You might have downloaded a hundred pictures from stockists, each with a thousand images in their gallery. The only way to do it is to save the information as you go. The simplest way to do this is that every time you download an image, save the URL (that's the bit written in the address bar) in a .txt file so you have a list when you come to the end.

However, the way that I use, which keeps all the info in the image file and lets you quickly extract it later is a little more complicated.

Before you download an image, copy the url. http://fuguestock.deviantart.com/art/Iceberg-07-Hole-Close-Up-433448188
Now download the image and rename it using the url. You'll have to delete the http:// and the slashes. fuguestock.deviantart.comartIceberg-07-Hole-Close-Up-433448188
The image now has a record of where it is and who made it. When you write the artwork's comments, simply copy and paste the name back, adding in the http:// and slashes. Then copy the stockist's name and add the :dev : either side.

I hope this has been useful. If you have a better way of crediting stock I'd love to know!