Tips from a former Curator - So you want to be Curated by those big Curation Groups. Chapter 2 - You Can't Cheat The System.

This is the second entry in my Tips from a former Curator on how to get your content noticed by the curators from the big curation groups. These are in no particular order, just as I come across them in my personal curation efforts.

_{Image Source: https://www.invistaperforms.org/training-content-curation-good-news-bad-news/}

Yesterday I talked about sharing an opinion rather than just listing a bunch of facts. You can check that out here: https://peakd.com/hive-174578/@mikepm74/tips-from-a-former-curator-so-you-want-to-be-curated-by-those-big-curation-groups-chapter-1-an-opinion

Tonight, we are going to a more basic fundamental that I am seeing a whole lot of as I go through my Communities feed - Passing off someone else's work as your own - Images.

There's no doubt about it, Photographers and Artists can do pretty well on Hive. Just look at some of the top pending posts out there, and there is art to be found in the list. Posting a picture and saying it is yours is a pretty easy way to make a buck, right? I mean you can just search the internet for a pretty picture and click copy and paste, and voila. Who needs all that EFFORT of actually creating content yourself?

The problem is, Curators are smarter than you. They've been doing it longer, have more tools, and are suspicious by nature. If you could find it on the internet and copy it, they can find it on the internet and confirm the original source faster and easier.

One might have been able to get away with such things before the invent of Communities. Your post wouldn't attract a whole lot of attention, it just would have flown under the radar. But when you post to a Curation Community, you are asking curators to curate your content. If you do get upvotes from people, and then a curator comes by, you'll be lucky if they just leave it be. The more likely outcome is that you get called out for copying work that doesn't belong to you and potentially downvoted.

Let's look at an example

I came across this image last night posted in one of the curation communities. The author claims that this is a painting that they did.

I become immediately suspicious of anything that someone is claiming as art that does not have any process photos. If you are making your own art, take pictures of your work along the way, post (and talk about) your process of creating the image. One picture with a couple of lines of text is not likely to land a curator vote.

But here's the next part. It's pretty simple really. Curators will check the validity of the image by doing a simple reverse image search.

We simply right click on the image you can scroll down to the nifty little tool "Search Google for Image". That will take you to a google search where it gives you it's closest matches to the picture you are searching for. Original images will come up with "Visually Similar" pictures. For instance, in this case it would give some pictures of birds, possibly hummingbirds specifically.

But if the image can be found in an exact match, it's usually going to pop right up as the first result.

Look at that first image result... Let's take a closer look, since it looks pretty familiar.

This is from a Chinese Article posted back in 2018. You can check it out for yourself here: https://www.xuehua.us/a/5ebcea4086ec4d3c92699020. This is a picture of the Loddigesia Mirabilis Hummingbird. It isn't a painting at all, and it is a pixel for pixel match to the image posted yesterday claiming to be a painting.

Curators don't miss these details. Don't post someone else's work in a curation led community as your own. This is Curating 101 and you won't win by cheating.

TL:DR - Only post your own original content, or source images you are borrowing to make a point. You won't draw the curators by trying to pass off someone else's intellectual property.