Crediting and linking the source of any republished photo or illustration on the web is one of the most important best practices of web publishing. Unfortunately, there isn’t a standard way of doing it in WordPress and authors are left with their own decision on how and where to credit the original author or website.

I decided to add a simple “Source URL” input field to every image that is uploaded. Adding credit with a link to the source of that image now becomes as easy as adding a title or caption for an image:

Implementation

You need to add the following snippet of PHP to your theme’s functions.php:

Add the source URL input field to image upload screen

add_filter("attachment_fields_to_edit", "add_image_source_url", 10, 2);
function add_image_source_url($form_fields, $post) {
	$form_fields["source_url"] = array(
		"label" => __("Source URL"),
		"input" => "text",
		"value" => get_post_meta($post->ID, "source_url", true),
                "helps" => __("Add the URL where the original image was posted"),
	);
 	return $form_fields;
}

add_filter("attachment_fields_to_save", "save_image_source_url", 10 , 2);
function save_image_source_url($post, $attachment) {
	if (isset($attachment['source_url']))
		update_post_meta($post['ID'], 'source_url', esc_url($attachment['source_url']));
	return $post;
}

Automatically append the source URL to image captions

add_filter('img_caption_shortcode', 'caption_shortcode_with_credits', 10, 3);
function caption_shortcode_with_credits($empty, $attr, $content) {
	extract(shortcode_atts(array(
		'id'	=> '',
		'align'	=> 'alignnone',
		'width'	=> '',
		'caption' => ''
	), $attr));

	// Extract attachment $post->ID
	preg_match('/\d+/', $id, $att_id);
	if (is_numeric($att_id[0]) && $source_url = get_post_meta($att_id[0], 'source_url', true)) {
		$parts = parse_url($source_url);
		$caption .= ' ('. __('via') .' <a href="'. $source_url .'">'. $parts['host'] .'</a>)';
	}

	if (1 > (int) $width || empty($caption))
		return $content;

	if ($id)
		$id = 'id="' . esc_attr($id) . '" ';

	return '<div ' . $id . 'class="wp-caption ' . esc_attr($align) . '" style="width: ' . (10 + (int) $width) . 'px">'
		. do_shortcode($content) . '<p class="wp-caption-text">' . $caption . '</p></div>';
}

Please note that the source URL will be visible only if you specify image caption upon inserting the image.