First of all, hi :)
I don't know if I've ever publicly acknowledged this, but the amount of attention this site has received has been shocking! 10 million views! I never imagined a site I built to basically be a nicer-looking dropbox for all the images taking up space on my computer would become a helpful tool to so many people. Unfortunately, the site has a pretty glaring issue, and that is the lack of sourcing on basically all of the images.
Some people have noticed that I've been updating the site periodically again, not really to add new content but mostly to add sources where I can. Many of the images on this site are from old Geocities graphic/pixel depositories and are unlikely to have living sources, but at the very least I want to make sure everything taken from sites such as Deviantart and Tumblr is properly sourced so that I show the artists the respect they deserve (and that Teenage Me clearly didn't show them when putting together this site). I still have people regularly come to me and thank me for putting together this site, but frankly, I can't be proud of myself for that if I'm encouraging people to continue the cycle of reposting art without credit. I have never been an artist, but it's clear to me that creating something you're proud of, putting time and effort into it, and then putting it out there into the world only for it to be reposted without credit could be devastating to an artist. And, at best, for those who are unfortunately accustomed to the practice, it would still be pretty annoying! I'd like to extend an apology to the artists that I have directly impacted in this way.
That being said, I have considered deleting the site. Sourcing everything is a daunting task; leaving everything as is is an even worse prospect. But the site is clearly important to a lot of people, and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't important to me too. So I've decided to dedicate some of my time, periodically, to slowly working my way through each page on the site and add sources where I can. I'll be using various reverse-image search engines to accomplish this. While I've added some sources here and there over the past year or two, when it comes to working my way through everything, I've only just begun.
As I said before, it's unrealistic to think that all (or even most) of the images on the site will be sourced by the time I've completed this process. Take the first page in my directory, for example: Bears. A lot of the images on this page were mass-downloaded from another "pixel compilation" site that has since gone under, and that similarly provided no sources. Many of the images probably have sources that don't exist anymore due to their age, and unfortunately, Web Archive does not provide a "search by image" option. So for a lot of these images, if I can't find a source through Google Images, Bing, TinEye, or one of the other image-search engines out there, I won't have any way to provide a source link. Another difficulty I face is that sometimes, even images which were clearly made within the last 15 years end up with no discernible source after the creator deletes their social media. On Tumblr, this can happen just when a user changes their URL, making some images from Tumblr impossible to reverse-image search despite the fact that they're still out there, original source intact. Cases like this are where random people recognizing image sources and DMing me can be really helpful, and I'd like to thank those who have already done this. Obviously, this is a task I have chosen to undertake myself, and I will work to the best of my ability; that being said, I am always happy to accept help from those who are willing to offer it. If you think you've found the source of an image that is currently unsourced, you can contact me through Discord (bonnibel1), Tumblr ask/DM, or just drop a note in my guestbook.
