WordPress doesn’t ship with a deliberate method for keeping track of where attachments have come from. You can toss sources (names and URLs) into caption or description fields, but those fields are not intended to house that information, they are not conducive for displaying said information, and thus the average WordPress user never divulges the origins of their attachments/media.
Thankfully, attachment fields are readily extensible, and it’s easy to display attribution—with the right code!
First, the following will add Source URL and Source Name fields to the “Attachment Details” and “Edit Media” screens:
With these fields in place—and source info subsequently entered—attachments can be attributed in a variety of ways. Below are two examples for attributing images used within post content by means of affixing a source link to each image’s HTML markup.
For captioned images:
And non-captioned images:
Note: If the source name is excluded, the hostname will be extracted from the URL, and that will be displayed as the source link text. This allows you to consciously omit the source name, in most cases, to expedite data entry. The hostname is often sufficient for attribution (but not always; a source name should be specified for nearly all social media URLs, for example).
The next step is to style the source links so that they look agreeable within context. Here is the raw CSS I used for one project—which will need to be tweaked—to afford you a head start:
Finally, here’s a screencap of the finished product (image with source-link attribution in the bottom-right corner):
Attribution should be commonplace and easy, though it typically isn’t, and this implementation is at least one small ethical step forward.
