People who want to monetise their images need to add a credit to them. When I save an image and know who created it (which is very rare), I put their name in the name of the image I save so that I can give credit if I reuse it. If there’s an associated URL that belongs to the creator, I’ll bookmark it with the same name as the image so I can find it and link to it when I use the image.

That’s a lot of work to do on behalf of creators who cannot be arsed to sign their own images. Most of the time, I can’t do it because I have no idea where it came from anyway.

And they can sign images but not easily add a clickable URL so that’s not a perfect solution anyway.

I know this doesn’t cover all of the click-thefts. But a lot of those click-thefts aren’t really thefts. They’re crediting the original but it’s the repost that goes viral. That’s something that can’t really be avoided without some tools operating in the background to reallocate clicks to the creator. And that’s not going to happen because the hosts of the click-thefts have absolutely no interest in it happening.

There are some simple ways to avoid accidental theft though. On Twitter (old Twitter, I know nothing of recent Twitter), big accounts often (accidentally) stole likes and RTs by quote-retweeting instead of just retweeting. Most of the time, there was no need for them to add a comment. Just a straight retweet would have sent interactions to the original instead. There are some similar choices that can be made on other social media. Here, for example, an archive link is often the only way for many people to view the article. But if the original source is considered less evil enough to deserve the clicks, linking the original and providing an archive link is probably better than just using an archive link in the main post.

Lot of different issues, not all of them solvable, I don’t think.