Credit and Sourcing on a Reblog Blog

By Mila Serrano · Privacy writer · Published 2 September 2026

Almost every image that reaches you on BDSMLR arrives with no idea where it came from. It was posted by someone who found it somewhere, who found it somewhere, and three or four hops back the caption got dropped and the trail ended. This is not an occasional failure of the system. It’s the ordinary condition, and any sourcing habit you build has to start from there rather than from how it ought to work.

Why the trail disappears

Credit doesn’t get destroyed on purpose. It leaks. A caption gets trimmed for tidiness. A screenshot gets taken because the original was awkward to reblog. Someone crops out a watermark because it sat badly in the frame. A blog with ten thousand posts goes dark and every link pointing at it dies at once. Each of those is a small, forgivable act, and together they’re why most of what you scroll is anonymous.

The result is that the last person holding a source is usually the first or second reblogger, and after that it’s gone for good. Which is worth knowing, because it means the cheap moment to preserve credit is early, and it’s cheap only then.

The people in the pictures

A share of what circulates was posted by the person in it, sometimes with a handle attached, sometimes not. Another share was taken from a paid account, or from a private exchange, or from a profile that had nothing to do with kink, and put into circulation by someone who wasn’t in it. There’s also a large middle where a picture was shared willingly in one place years ago and has since travelled somewhere the person never imagined.

You mostly can’t sort these apart by looking. Nothing about an image tells you whether the person in it wanted it on a public blog. What you can do is stop treating the absence of a name as the absence of a person, because the two feel identical when you’re scrolling and they aren’t the same thing at all.

This is also the reason the take-down conversation goes the way it does. When someone turns up in your messages about a post, they’re rarely arguing about copyright.

What credit actually costs

Nothing, in the common case. Leaving a post as you found it, caption and chain intact, is the default behaviour and takes zero effort. Stripping it takes a deliberate action. Most missing credit on well-run blogs is not malice, it’s tidiness: people remove captions because they clutter the blog, or because they want their own tags to read cleanly.

If a caption genuinely wrecks the look of your blog, the fix is to keep the source and lose the rest rather than take the lot. A handle or a link at the bottom of a post costs you almost no visual space and is the entire difference between a post that can be traced and one that can’t.

The other thing credit costs you is nothing in reach. Attributed posts don’t travel less. If anything, people who make things reblog the blogs that leave their names on, which quietly shapes who ends up in your orbit.

Sourcing when the trail has gone

You’ll often be dealing with an image that has no caption, no watermark and no obvious origin. There’s a sequence worth running before you post it, and it takes about a minute:

• Read the reblog chain. Whatever chain is still attached, follow it to the earliest blog you can reach and look at what that blog said about the post. Sometimes the caption survives at the bottom of a chain that later rebloggers trimmed from the top.
• Look at the image itself. Watermarks, a handle in a corner, a printed URL, a logo on a set. These are frequently cropped but often only partly.
• Run a reverse image search. It won’t find much of what circulates on adult platforms, but when it does hit it usually lands you on the actual origin rather than another reblog.
• Check the neighbours. If the post came from a set, the rest of the set may be on the same blog with the credit still attached to a different frame.

If all of that comes back empty, you have two honest options. Post it and say plainly that you don’t know the source, which at least doesn’t imply you do. Or don’t post it. The second is the right call more often than people admit, and it’s the only real answer for anything that looks like it was taken from somewhere private.

Saying what you don’t know

A short, accurate note beats a confident guess. “Source unknown, happy to credit” reads fine and is true. Naming a probable creator who turns out to be someone else is worse than saying nothing, because it attaches a person to work that isn’t theirs and the mistake then travels with the post.

The same goes for the people in the picture. Don’t identify anyone, don’t speculate, and don’t add details you picked up elsewhere. Anonymity in these images is doing work for the person in them, and a caption that narrows them down undoes it in one line. This is the same reasoning that sits behind staying anonymous on your own account, pointed at somebody else.

When someone asks you to take it down

It happens to anyone who runs a blog for long enough. A message arrives, usually short and often not friendly, asking you to remove a post.

Remove it. Then, if you want, reply.

The reasons to do it in that order are practical. The person is usually not in a state to negotiate, the post is worth very little to you, and every minute it stays up while you decide is a minute they’re watching it stay up. Nothing about the request being rude or vague changes the arithmetic.

A few things not to do. Don’t ask them to prove it’s them, which requires them to identify themselves further in the exact situation where they’re trying not to. Don’t tell them it was already public, which they know. Don’t leave it up while you look for the original poster. And don’t quietly move it to a side blog, which people do and which is the single worst response available.

If it came from a set, look at the rest of the set on your blog and pull those too. They didn’t ask about the others because they haven’t found them yet.

A standard you can actually keep

Rules you follow at three in the morning are the only ones that count, so keep the list short:

• Leave captions and chains intact unless you have a real reason.
• If you strip, keep the source line.
• Say when you don’t know. Never guess a name.
• Don’t post anything that looks lifted from somewhere private.
• Remove on request, first, without arguing.

That’s most of it. It won’t fix a platform-wide habit and it isn’t meant to. It makes your blog one of the ones where the trail is still there, which is the only part of this that’s in your hands. The content rules cover the harder lines, and the archive problem covers what happens to all of this when a blog goes dark.

In practice

Most images circulating here arrived with no source attached, because captions get trimmed, watermarks get cropped, screenshots replace originals, and blogs holding the last live link go dark. That leaves every blog owner making the same quiet call several times a day: post it anyway, post it with an honest note that the source is unknown, or leave it. The people in these pictures are real, and a large share of them never agreed to any of this, which is the part that turns an etiquette question into a practical one. The blogs that handle it well aren't doing anything elaborate. They leave captions and chains intact, they don't guess at names, and when someone asks for a post to come down it comes down first and gets discussed after.

For beginners

Start with the free version: don't strip captions. Leaving a post as you found it costs nothing and preserves the only trail anyone has. If you're posting something loose with no source, say so plainly rather than implying you know. Never add identifying details about the person in an image, and don't guess at a creator's name, because a wrong credit travels with the post forever. If someone messages you asking you to remove a post of them, remove it, then reply if you want to.

For experienced users

The habit worth having is a one-minute sourcing pass before anything goes up: walk the reblog chain to the earliest blog you can reach, check the frame for a watermark or handle, run a reverse image search, and look at the rest of the set if it came from one. Long-running blogs also treat their own archive as a record other people rely on, because a blog that keeps its source lines is often the last place a particular attribution survives. On takedowns, the experienced answer is to pull the post and then check the surrounding set for the same person, since they usually haven't found the others yet.