Wall of text ahead :3 Please let me know if this topic belongs here, it's about old/lost media, but doesn't really fit into the listed topics, so I wasn't sure.
I often look at old web images and GIFs that people repost, and think how someone had to actually make it. The photos you see, that was happening somewhere at some point in time. I wanted to talk about this.
How do you look for sources, do you look for them at all, any thoughts and memories...
Someone had to model and animate an this adorable gif. 3D animation, and animation in general, is hard, and it was even harder back then...
The water-reflection rose gif was modified by someone out there, and it's a photo of an actual rose that bloomed somewhere at some point in time, and someone took a photo of it. We can look at it to this day.
I found both of these on GifCities, an Internet Archive project. You can click these to see what GeoCity website it was archived from, but pretty often it's obvious that it's a repost. Finding sources is tedious nowadays, plenty of websites are not online anymore, and the reverse image search engines can be beyond shitty and unhelpful, and mostly just harvesting your data while giving no answers.
Here is an example, when I was looking for the squirrel GIF, the oldest findings are allegedly from Feb 15, 2008... warning: Google was used here
But some time ago, when looking for other images, I already saw some websites that most likely were messing with the reverse search engine, and were absolutely not that old. I have to admit that I used to be pretty good at looking for sources, at least compared to other nerd kids on the web haha. Now the search engines got enshittified and cluttered, I'm still adapting to this change.
So please, if you have any tips on looking for sources in 2025, let me know. I usually use SauceNao, and the stuff it has linked after it fails to find anything (lol)
