Help:Sourcing and Linking Images
Sourcing and Linking Images[edit]
Images are an invaluable part of most pages on this wiki. They help evoke atmosphere and importance in the eyes of readers. If an image is worth a thousand words, then adding one to a page is sure to help it become a more concise and potent piece of homebrewed content. But there's a problem with images, and that is that people make them, and those people understandably don't want others to profit of their own images. Which is images can't be uploaded or even hosted without giving credit (giving credit doesn't mean an image is allowed to stay, it's just the basic politeness of using someone else's work). So, images staying on the D&Dwiki must adhere to the D&D_Wiki:Copyrights policy. Importantly, if images can't be uploaded with valid licensing, then they shouldn't be uploaded at all. They should instead be linked through from another site, and their copyright holders should be credited. Where they are allowed to stay until the moment those same copyright holders wish them taken down.
Finding the Source of an Image[edit]
So, you have an image, and it fits perfectly on your precious page! But, one little problem... you don't know who made it, at all! This means you can't post it on D&Dwiki, since you can't source it? Feat not, for this is where the technique of finding an image's source comes in: Image searching (technically called "Reverse Image Search"), which is a name for services that scour the web for identical or similar images, and spit out where else they exist on the internet, this can allow you to find more about an image, and ultimately find its copyright holder. There's a lot of ways to Image search, most of them involving different online services. Listed is short list on what each service does and when to use it,
Use Image Searching Sites[edit]
this list is ordered from most to least useful
Google is a good image searching website, it goes through a lot of forums, reddit, pinterest, and just a lot of weird, weird others, it's a good place to start with any image. Google's most useful feature is actually the "Other sizes of this image" feature, which can often give the original, non down-sampled version of an image, which is useful both for finding the original version of something, and having the best version to post after you finally find the source.
Bing is surprisingly a very good image searching algorithm, it's actually the easiest to use in finding different sizes of an image and shifting through hundreds of places where it's posted. It's as ubiquitous as google in its image searching abilities.
Yandex is a Russian search engine, and will logically provide you with Russian sites, it will definitely save your skin to check anything you can on it.
Tineye is a very old image searching algorithm, and it's only gotten smarter with time. It will find you pictures in places no other search engine dares to cache, and it actually can see through some Impressive editing, its most useful feature is ordering matches found by age posted, because obviously the original picture has to be posted first to be reposted
Iqdb (image query data base) is a crawler that searches through anime oriented image databases, it's good at finding anime artwork; Be careful of porn in the in the "Possible matches" section. Iqdb does provide you with quick options to use SauceNao, Tineye, ascii2d and Google images, but This is a trap!! What it will actually search is a down-sampled picture of about 100 pixels high while keeping aspect ratio. This won't affect SauceNao and Tineye, but you'll have to search ascii2d and Google Images again if you don't find anything.
SauceNAO searches through a particular set of sites that no other image searching service does, it will find you images posted from pixiv, and newer deviantart submissions. It also shares through doujinshi pages, as that is what it was made for.
Ascii2d searches through pixiv and twitter, it's slow and hard to use, but it has its purpose and can sometimes find what you're looking for when others don't. It being in Japanese makes it hard to use, however
Baidu is a Chinese search engine, and it will definitely find you matches of your picture. The problem is that it often can't find you the source of author of the image, even when they are Chinese. A lot of times you'll be lead further away from your destination.
Same as before really, except more finicky, when it works it gives you Google like results, with deep ais giving you info about what your picture is about, compared to the above, which just finds you matches
This is a site for stock images, with an image search function, if your image may be a stock image and you haven't found any definitive leads, try here
Same thing as above, stock pictures, alamy has generally more art while shutterstock has more real photos, use it if needed or desperate
This is a site made for getting the source of screenshots of anime. It's very good for what it does, and if your image is an anime screenshot, this will be what you turn to first, and probably all you will need. It's good, but unedited anime screenshots may not be the best thing to use as a picture for an article.
This is a site that searches through Reddit, and it is incredibly slow about it, google does it much faster with many more things added. You usually won't find what you want on Reddit anyways.
- Others
If all above cannot find the source of an image, it's probably lost to the void, but on the internet, there's always another way, and another search engine, here are some additional options for the desperate:
Getty Images, 3d.iqdb, iStock, Adobe Stock, Depositiphotos, Pinterest, Kihoo 360 Images, Jingdong, Taobao, Alibaba China, Mail.ru Image Search, Dreamstime, Alamy, 123RF, eSearch plus, TMview, Global Brand Database, Madrid Monitor, Australian Trade Mark Search, Australian Design Search, IPONZ Trade Mark Check, Graphic Image Park, PimEyes, Stocksy United, Pond5, PIXTA, Pictriev, IKEA, st.so
Look the Damn Thing Over[edit]
One of the biggest blunders you can do while trying to find an image's source is start sailing the internet before properly checking what you want to search for. Some artists put their name in the corner. Some people put the artists (not license) when they upload a picture. Sometimes it's that easy.
In general it's a good idea to check the picture in its full size(check all four corners), its title (which is in the page URL), any upload comments and exif data if it was uploaded to D&Dwiki, and the site it was linked from.
Use external tools to help[edit]
If you think putting your image into searching algorithms is busy work that should be automated, then you are in luck. There are external tools that can do just that, this generally removes a lot of the hassle of finding images, but it generally creates a lot of clutter, users with low RAM beware.
Search by image is an extension that provides access to Google, BInd, Yandex, Tineye, Baidu, Sogou, Shutterstock and Alamy. That's a good list, it's all the "multi-purpose" search engines available. That is, until you check its options tab, and realize it has 'everything' on that list above (others tab included). It's convenient, it works, it's intuitive, and it has a wonderful "All search Engines" button, which will just open 12-40 tabs where it has already searched the picture, it's really amazing, and will cut hours of your life if you search for image source a lot.
This browser extention doesn't include as many of the "Google-likes", what it does have is anime oriented search engines. It also has very extensive options for adding your own custom search algorithms to automate, making it potentially the most versatile tool in the list.But without an obvious way to do multi search engine searching, it falls short.
This is actually a site, and it seems to be quite old, though updated throughout, it can automatically search Google, Bing, Tineye, Karma Decay, Yandex, Baidu, Sogou, and St.So, iqdb, saucenao, ascii2d, trace.moe, Pictriev. it also has other nifty tools like seeing your picture's exif data , also has stuff like easy inputting into up-sampling algorithms or photo editors, which definitely help in fringe cases. All in all it's not very convenient but it's still surprisingly robust.
Re-search Less Edited Version[edit]
When you are searching the source of an image what you have in your clipboard is usually an image that is down-sampled (down sampling refers to making images smaller in resolution, in this context), and if it isn't, it may be cropped, or washed out. When this happens, you'll usually find a match that is either a bigger, or less edited version of the image, but that match itself does not contain information about the source. In these cases, you should try searching for the source using the new found image, just like you did the last. This will be a long process without using any tools to help you search for images, but it is often necessary to find the source of many images.
Search Similar Elements[edit]
When you have a lot of leads, you may find pictures that you are relatively sure are related with the picture you want to find the owner of (as in, they have the same copyright holder). In these cases finding the source of one may very well mean finding the source for all of them. This is a time-wasting option, and should be tried after searching for the original image fails, as you are going an even longer way around, and effectively doubling (or tripling, quadrupling etc) the amount of leads and time searching for the source of a picture.
Un-edit Edited Pictures[edit]
You may very well find edited pictures on the wiki, including, like before, down-sampling, hue editing, or collaging (where more individual pictures have been edited together). These can all be "scrubbed" with online tools, image editors can help with returning the "natural" (you will have to guess) hue of an image and cropping parts of a collage (if the parts of a collage have different authors to properly source it source you, you must source ALL pieces used within the collage). This is quite basic, you can find Image editors on google who can do this . A down-scaled image can be up-scaled using deep-ai with tools such as waifu2x . Be careful about upscaling though, you are creating a new resolution for the image which may not have existed on the internet, lowering your match count, also upscaling tools can change an image's footprint enough to make matches miss more, so you should only do this after traditional methods fail.
Linking Images on the Wiki[edit]
As noted, it's a better idea to upload an image to somewhere else, then link it onto a D&Dwiki page using an imageholder template. For this you can use any sites, from dedicated image hosting sites like imgur or wix, to general aggregate sites like Pinterest or Google. You may even use a site that hosted the picture when you were searching for its copyright holders as the place to link your image from. All that is required is for the site to hold the image at a specific URL ( if you open the image in a new tab, and the end of the URL contains ".png" or ".jpg" then you can link it onto any page)
The image holders[edit]
There are two external image holders that you can use, the "5e" one, and the "D20" one. They are quite identical in purpose and look, but the 5e one is easier to use, so I recommend you stick to it:
<div class="externalimage-holder" style="width:30%;float:right"> {{5e Image|float:right| | }}</div>
<div class="externalimage-holder" style="width:30%;float:right;">
{| class="D20" style="float:right"! |- | |}</div>
Parts of the image holder[edit]
- width
30% is just a default, this is obviously how big the image is, proportional to its original size, adjust this as needed, can only be a whole number from 1 to 100.
- float
This is refering to the float inside the class of the style of the div element, not inside the image element istelf, it's default to right, which makes it go to the right of the page, you can use left to make it to the left (text wraps around it) or remove it to make the text stay on the left on the page and make text not wrap around it (this generally looks ugly and is not recommended)
- | or !
After this, where you see your empty space is where you put your image link in.
- |
This is the second verical bar if you're using the 5e image holder and the first if you're using the d20 one. This is where you put the image caption, if the image already had a caption, it should be put here. This is also where you MUST Credit the authors, in general if you know someone made the picture, you should drop their full name or online handle, if you know more people worked on it, credit them too, if you know it was used for something or made for a product, include that too, there's really no too much when it comes to crediting. A good habit when crediting is linking to sites of the people, companies, or products you credit, you do this by putting straight paranthesis around the link you want to link to, then a space and what you want to make the link say. For example [http://www.ericbelisle.com/ Eric Belisle] will show up as Eric Belisle
Deleting un-sourced images[edit]
After you find the proper source for an image and have linked it externally, be sure to remember to mark the original image for deletion. If the uncredited image is still on the site at the end of the day, it doesn't matter that you've credited the artist on the actual page.