Where's George, for public records
Found a code stamped on one of our pictures? Type it in. It will tell you what the thing is, when it was made, and who to credit.
Case doesn't matter, and you can skip the dashes.
Every picture, video and document this project releases carries a stamp burned into the corner, the way a film camera's date back burned the date into the negative:
That last line is the serial. It is unique to one file, and it is derived from the file itself, so it can't be confused with another. The alphabet skips I, L, O and U on purpose — you should never have to guess whether that was a one or an ell.
Mostly for the fun of it, and to make credit possible. Work from this project gets reposted, quoted, mirrored, and increasingly hoovered into training sets. None of that is inherently bad — this is public-records work and we want it to travel. But travelling anonymously helps nobody: readers can't find their way back to the source, and the people who did the work go uncredited.
A serial fixes that cheaply. Find one, type it here, and the trail leads home.
This tracks files, not people. There is no account, no cookie, and nothing about you is recorded when you look up a serial. The only thing in the registry is a list of things we made.
We'd genuinely like to know — that's the fun part. Tell us where you saw it at derrick@everythingisperfect.org, and include the serial. If someone used our work without credit, that's usually an oversight rather than malice, and a polite note fixes it more often than not.
Reusing something? You're welcome to — see Provenance & Attribution for how we handle credit ourselves, including credit owed away from us.