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I am wondering if anyone has a good solution for storing images and their credits, so that it's easy to attribute the correct credit to the correct image in, for instance, LaTeX or similar software.

Currently I'm storing a text file with the credit information in the same directory as the images, but is there a better, lightweight, open source solution?

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  • What you are looking for is called a "reference manager" or a "citation manager". Waaaaaaaay back when I was in university, I remember using Mendeley for it: sourceforge.net/software/product/Mendeley No idea how it's doing these days though. libguides.mit.edu/cite-write/bibtex still mentions it and also a couple of others.
    – muru
    Commented Nov 27, 2023 at 10:08
  • I'm well aware of them, I have used Mendeley, now using jabref etc, but I don't see that they would be very convenient for storing images
    – Dolphin
    Commented Nov 27, 2023 at 10:18
  • Back when I used it, I didn't store files inside it. They were stored in the filesystem like normal, but just indexed by Mendeley with reference information attached. It didn't care about the filetype, image or PDF or doc, all the same.
    – muru
    Commented Nov 27, 2023 at 12:45
  • I has changed, but there are reference managers that allow for storage at any place. The issue is still that the image and the credit are not connected when using the image. Instead of an image and a text file, one now has an image and a bib file.
    – Dolphin
    Commented Nov 28, 2023 at 12:57
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    Then you might want to try something like storing the citation information as an EXIF tag. At any rate, it's a pretty niche use case, most people I knew had workflows built around these reference managers. You might want to try asking at Academia instead.
    – muru
    Commented Nov 28, 2023 at 14:22

1 Answer 1

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You can use Zotero, a free, opensource, and overall awesome reference manager for this.

  1. You can install Zotero using the following command:

    sudo snap install zotero-snap

    If you don't like snaps, you can install Zotero as a Flatpak or Zotero as a deb using apt by following the respective installation instructions.

  2. You also have to install Zotero Connector for the browser you use.

  3. After installing Zotero with your prefered way and Zotero Connector, open Zotero, visit a website with an image and click the Save to Zotero icon on your browser's toolbar:

    browser window showing the Save to Zotero button

    Credits for image shown in browser window: Nostriker, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

  4. The image should be now saved in Zotero and you may edit the metadata in the panel on the right:

    Zotero window with the saved image

  5. You may also download the image locally and attach a local copy of it in the image item inside Zotero by right-clicking the image item → Add Attachment → Attach Stored Copy of File... and selecting the downloaded image:

    Zotero window showing right-click menu of image item

  6. As you may have noticed in the screenshots above, the image item is stored as Web Page. To properly attribute images you have to change this by going to the right panel → clicking the value of Item Type and changing it to Artwork.

  7. Finally, if you want to manually add an Artwork item (without clicking the Save to Zotero icon in your browser's toolbar), you can also click the green plus icon in Zotero's toolbar → More → Artwork and manually add info in the right panel.

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  • I'm sorry, but there are some steps missing. How do you know use this easily as an image credit and include the image? For a normal references you would cite it (using a bib file…), but you don't care about there the pdf, book, item is stored. In this case you very much do.
    – Dolphin
    Commented Nov 28, 2023 at 12:51
  • I'm not sure I understand what you need. Do you want to be able to copy the attached image and also the respective citation?
    – BeastOfCaerbannog
    Commented Nov 28, 2023 at 13:23
  • I would want to store the image and credit text together so that one only needs to go one place to get both for inclusion in a document. Doing more research, it looks like the best would probably be to write the credit information in the image metadata following the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard. That way the image contains the necessary credit information that can be extracted at use time.
    – Dolphin
    Commented Nov 28, 2023 at 13:58
  • Ok, would this procedure help? Open Zotero, right-click an image item and select Show File. This will open a file manager in the stored image file location, so you can copy it easily and paste it where you want. Then right-click the image item in Zotero again and select Create Bibliography from Item.... Then select the bibliography style you like, select Copy to Clipboard as output method and click OK. The citation is copied to your clipboard and you can easily paste it where you like.
    – BeastOfCaerbannog
    Commented Nov 28, 2023 at 14:05

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