I need help figuring out if this picture was stolen from elsewhere on the internet.

I run a nail art community called Nail Art Amino. Our number one rule is that all content must be original - you cannot post nail art you just found somewhere online, and you especially cannot claim that you made it. Art theft gets you an instant ban, given we can prove it was stolen. We absolutely do not tolerate art theft, and we take it very seriously.

Today a user posted an image I find suspicious. This is the image: https://ibb.co/fnLzYd (Ignore the "Nail Art Amino" border at the bottom, unfortunately the app adds that whenever you save a picture.)

There are several things that make me question it:

▫️ The border/background

▫️ The slight tilt of the picture

▫️ The low image quality

▫️ It was her first ever post, and there was no text content along with the image, no "hi, I'm new here!" or anything like that, which is extremely unusual

It seems to me like she put the image into a photo editing app, cropped out the watermark, tilted it by accident while cropping, then took a screenshot of the preview or something. It just feels off.

In addition, when asked about it, she claimed Instagram, saying the app "cropped it to look like that" which makes no sense, as no one I've asked has ever seen Insta do that. When pressed further she claimed she took the picture in Snapchat then used Instagram to brighten it. Again, this makes no sense - Instagram puts out square pictures, for one thing, but for another, where did this border come from?

Because of the way we run things, I cannot take any against her until I prove for certain that she stole the image. However, a reverse image search on Google got me absolutely nothing. My friend who I asked to help try and look noted that it's possible the tilt, border and maybe even low quality compression may have been done deliberately to confuse any reverse searches.

(You may ask, why would she steal such mediocre nail art? Personally, I think that'd be a smart way to avoid getting caught. If it looks kinda average, no one will question whether you actually did it yourself, right?)

So I'm at a loss here, and I'm hoping you guys can help me search for the original since I've had no luck. The picture itself and her behavior in particular are really suspicious, so I'm almost certain it is not her picture. I just can't prove it, so I'm asking for help. :( I really hope someone here can work some magic and find it. If we do in fact have an art thief on our hands, I want to get her out of our community as soon as possible.

Submitted July 23, 2018 at 05:39AM by ShiversTheNinja https://ift.tt/2LqKywN