Discoveries of Flickr Photo Reuse Under the Spell of Magic Pixsy Dust

The semi-regular email notices from Pixsy made it a good day to peer into the flickr photo reuse mirror and add to my album of 379 photos reused elsewhere on the intertubes. Sure it’s my own navel gazing vanity, but mostly its wild curiosity not only to see who is reusing my photos but in some curious ways.

I’ve done this periodically as the blog tags will tell but the notable thing is my use of a service that is not really the way most others do. Pixsy’s own headline declares “Find and fight image theft. Take back control of your images. See where & how your images are being used online! Get paid when your images are used without a license or permission.” Only the 3rd sentence I care about, and heck why say it when I have already said it:

Reversing a Reverse Image Search

I only use Pixsy as its reverse image search from my flickr pile quite readily finds my photos all over the place… like ~17,000 cases! I’ve been using Pixsy for quite some time as an account came with my FlickrPro subscription- thought it was not until today in an exchange with Kevin Hodgson I found out that that’s not even a flickr perk anymore, though the flickr perk is not all that different from the free Pixsy Tier.

Alan is @cogdog 🇨🇦

cogdog@cosocial.ca

@dogtrax Oi, that's too bad. I see my account listed with flickr pro plan.

But their free play monitors "500" photos meaning I think it activlly tracks only 500. The flickr pro plan was set at 10000, but I can see its whole past archive of 16000+ trackings. I'm not too sure exactly how it works, but mine keeps finding new matches.

I'd try the free plan. Since I never go after anyone, it works well for me.

November 12, 2026, 3:14 pm 0 boosts 0 favorites

I comb through the recent matches and look for links that are either interesting or look like they are legit (there’s bunch in Facebook that I ignore). My m ain goal is find a few more that are not in my Reused Photo album so I can add them, but I also end up adding a comment with a link as to where they were spotted and anything else curious I note. I also give some shoutouts for the ones that give attribution credit, gold start for the CC0 ones where by letter of the license law they do not have to.

Here are the latest ones added.

Hey Dunkin Donuts: You Call THAT Frozen Coffee?

Hey a photo of mine on a chain’s menu is maybe a big deal, right?

That’s a photo of one of my fruit smoothies I started doing (especially to use up fruit that is starting to turn) here in 2009 when I had gotten a VitaMix machine. The funny thing is the photo of a Strawberry + Banana + Peach smoothie is used as first image playing the part of a frozen coffee on Dunkin’ Donuts Frozen Coffee Menu: Coffee Chiller Prices, Calories & Caffeine.

Hey a good actor can play any part, right? I do notice many of the pixsy finds are my flickr photos with more than my usual 5 views, this one has 3,134 views (a few more today from me).

As Fred the Baker never said “Time to Make the Fruit Smoothie Iced Coffee!”

Lone Poppy Gets Some Attribution Love

I’ve ranted before about The Weird Toy Space of Scavenged Public Domain Images (A Bit Slimy, Too) where I tracked photos at those many variations of “free photo” sites that scavenge them from Pixabay. It’s nice to see Picryl is not always one of those.

Yes, my photo is public domain via CC0, and in the most typical explanation that means to many “you can use it and you do not have to attribute it!” But why not attribute? why not share where it came from? Maybe someone would want to find more photos of my poppies?

So it’s a nice photo yes? and nice to see it as well on a Picryl page where they include my photo title, caption, location, and best of all an attribution under Copyright Info “Alan Levine of Flickr, made this file available under the Creative Commons CCO 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication” along with a direct link my original in flickr. Making note here, in flickr, that poppy phoro has racked up 3,976 views, maybe more if you peeked.

Ain’t that nice?

And holy pickle, Picyrl, if I see that search link at the top right, they have set up and attributed 2026 of my photos. Pixsy dust, again.

Mom! What Are you Doing in that Open Textbook?

One of the Pixsy dust ripples caught my eye as it was one of my photos of my Mom and the link to libretexts.org indicates she appears in some open textbook. How hip are you Mom, you in an OER?

Indeed that’s a sweet happy photo of Mom in one her yearly visits when I lived in Strawberry, Arizona, in fact this visit was in November 2010, the last time before she passed away the following August. Why she is having so much reading  1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die is known only to her.

But sure enough, the Pixsy magic worked and found her photo inside chapter 4 of SPAN101 created at Ivy Tech Community College. The links took me to 4.4.2: Ejercicios- La ropa– Spanish language practice activities related to clothing. I immediately recognized a page full of H5P activities, multiple choice and more matching exercises inside the Course Presentation content types. But where was Mom?

I did not see her until I started paging through the questions under Actividad 4.4..2 B, number 7, where I think you have to pick the photo of what the Spanish audio is describing. What’s even cooler is… Mom is the correct answer!

And heck, because I know a bit about H5P, I can embed that activity here for you to experience how it is for Actividad 4.4.4.2 in SPAN101:

Not to quibble too much, but my photo used here is shared under a CC BY license bu no attribution is listed with others at the bottom of this page under “Contributors and Attributions.” Besides that, as again, I know some H5P, there is built into this tool the ability to attribute every single media item used in it (see the Rights of Use button in the embed) as descibed over n the H5P kitchen entry I made a while ago under Meeting Up With H5P Metadata. In my experience almost no one makes use of the internal feature to attribute all media.

Since I know and work with Delmar Larsen who runs LibreTexts I could make a stink, but he’s a good guy and this is hardly worth the time.

But there you go, Mom is helping some people learning to understand Spanish get practice with words about clothing. That flickr photo of Mom has 4712 views.

Those LaCie Hard Drives Are Watching You Watch Them

Who the heck would need a photo of these old hard drives I once used at Maricopa as storage for servers? The blue light indicated they were up and serving.

Pixsy found this photo on a post by DataRecovery.com’s article on LaCie Data Recovery. It is nice hto ave an attribution (sort of , a few items short of full TASL) in the caption “LaCie external hard drive on a desk. Photo: cogdogblog, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)”

Alas no link provided. Let me search that for you, DartaRecovery.com I got it right here (and also in good spirt, Wikimedia Commons links to the original in flickr) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:We’re_watching!_(4055380).jpg. I got there by searching Wikimedia Commons for Lacie Hard Drive where curious enough I found three more of my flickr photos of various hard drives.

And while we are counting, this photo in flickr has a respectable 4,140 views.

But the hardware pixsy dust is not done yet.

XML and the Machine That’s Not There

The next Pixsy rabbit hole pointed to another hardware/server photo from my Maricopa days:

This photo was found as the featured image in an article from MarkupSuite on When to Use XML in a JSON World. Nopw what this photo has to do with either XML or JSON is above my tech grade. The sheer irony is that the subject of this photo is not in the photo! This was a table of desktop computers I setup in the hallway outside my office at Maricopa, what is missing on the left of the monitor was an Apple XServe a rack mounted Appleshare server that once ran the first home of this blog at jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu (well in 1998 it had just a web cam but by 2006 it had several MovableTyple blogs and an early version of Feed2JS).

The Xserve actually sat atop those two books (my idea to “bookmount” it to allow air to circulate) themselves tech reclicts as books about Macromedia Shockwave. See a better view of my “server” farm.

Weirdly enough the photo the MarkupSuite folks picked to use has 10,469 views (why?)

Play the iGuitar Back to the Days of the DailyShoot

This last one trips my brain even more. It was I thought a clever composition for the DailyShoot photo challenge, the web site that generated the idea for the DS106 Daily Create.

This was my response for Daily Shoot 101: “@dailyshoot: 2010/02/24: There is often a conflict between traditional and contemporary. Make a photo that shows this tension. (@melhutch) #ds101” My photo caption summarizes the thinking behind this photo where I matched almost perfectly an iPhone guitar ap aligned with the fretboard of my Takamine acoustic guitar:

Oh man, when I read the assignment this morning, I thought– “is this the first one I bail on?” — I had no clue what to do; I played with book and computer (too easy), old and new phones, then did some stuff with my iPhone and my old drawer of CDs… then shazam! (get it?)

I saw my guitar sitting on a chair and remembered my iPhone has the PocketGuitar app..

So there you go, traditionald and contemporary guitars, though not much tension.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/37996646802@N01/4385871127

That photo was taken on February 24, 2010 and the Pixsy fairies found it for a modern guitar app called LiberLive in it’s post  How the LiberLive App Works: Songs, Chords, Transpose, and No Subscription I get no attributuin but the fun is on them as the app in the photo wss called PocketGuitar and apparently is still around in 2026.

And woah, Flickr, I had no idea this photo has 31,352 views!

Here’s to the Pixsy’s

Thanks to Pixsy again I not only can find where my photos have been used, but I find each trace brings something of interest and even updatable back to my photos. And it helps me build up the album of reused photos, now pushing 380. I am not finding image theft (in fact I have always gave them away at the least restrictive license). I am not “taking back control” of my photos, I relinquish all ideas of control or getting paid, even if someone actually can make money from them, go ahead. I do not take photos to make money, it’s my joy to take and share.

My notes on the view counts are interesting to me as I am thinking the more views photos get the more that show up on search and the more they get found and reused it just feeds back on itself. Even the lowest numbers here are 1n order of magnitude more than I see on. regular basis.

I will be back again with more rounds of playing with the residue of the pixsy dust.

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Featured Image: Pixie Hollow Enchantment flickr photo by armadillo444 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC 2.0) license (I am making a point to thank Carlos for this photo)