Something BIG is Coming Soon

I wanted to give a heads up that something big is coming very soon. This is something I’ve been working on for over a year, and it’s finally nearly ready. Within the next few days, I will make an announcement and publish it. This will require that I post a bunch of articles nearly all at once. I know that some of you receive email notifications whenever new articles are posted, so I’m warning you now: you’re going to get inundated with emails. It will be a massive content dump, but that’s just the way it has to be. My apologies in advance, to anyone who might be annoyed by that. Hopefully the content itself will make it worthwhile.

What is this upcoming thing? Well, you’ll just have to wait a bit longer to find out. I don’t know if everyone will appreciate it, but I think some of you will be thrilled. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for probably four or five years now, and it took 14 months from start-to-finish once I began working on it. It was a team effort, with eight people involved in one way or another. I can’t wait to share it with you!

In unrelated news, I’ve experienced something unusual lately, and I’m not sure what to do with it, but I feel the need to share this story. To start, let’s go back in time six years. This was about four years after I first began to make Fujifilm Recipes, and a handful of months before I launched the Fuji X Weekly App. Recipes were just starting to gain popularity within the community. It was before Fujifilm was even aware that their users were creating, sharing, and using camera setting combinations that were being dubbed “recipes”. Fuji X Weekly was (by far) the main source of Recipes back then, but others began to make and publish their own. One day I received a message from someone accusing me of copying another person’s recipes, only changing the names. As it turned out, the exact opposite was true: I created those Recipes and published them months or even years before the other person. They were copied from Fuji X Weekly and the names were simply changed. This was not the first or (anywhere near) the last time that happened, but it was the first time that I was accused of stealing my own creations. I think it happened because the accuser visited that other person’s website prior to discovering this one, so the order in which they saw the Recipes made them believe that I had copied them instead of vice versa, and they didn’t pay attention to the dates.

Fast forward to 2026, and it’s happened twice this year, just within the last couple of months. What I’ve come to realize is that whenever I publish a new Recipe, it’s being republished on different websites and/or uploaded to different apps within days, sometimes within hours. Often enough, it’s with my own photos, used without permission. This happens constantly. Sometimes the Recipe has the same name; sometimes the name has been changed. The uninitiated, who is maybe new to Fujifilm and the whole Recipe thing, knows nothing about the history. Maybe they’re getting their settings from a different website or app and aren’t very familiar with Fuji X Weekly. They just see the same settings that they found elsewhere, and make the (false) assumption that I copied it from that place whenever they find it here, instead of the correct answer, which is that it was copied from Fuji X Weekly.

After the most recent accusation, I looked at one app, and found my Kodak Portra 400 v2 Recipe listed 15 times. Sometimes it was under that name, but a lot of times the name was changed. In one instance it had my photos. Twice there was a setting that was different, and I’m not sure if that was a tweak or a typo (how could anyone know?). In none of the 15 examples was my name or this website mentioned, each time the credit was given to someone else instead. I repeated this for a handful of other Recipes, and the results were similar.

In the article, The Evolution of Fujifilm Recipes, I stated, “Credit isn’t about ownership, it’s about storytelling. It helps to trace how an aesthetic came to be, and it honors the shared journey that got us there.” I wrote that before these recent incidents. It demonstrates very clearly why it’s important. Apparently it needed to be said, and it bears repeating. It’s frustrating to spend hours—if not days, weeks, or (on a rare occasion) even months—getting the settings “just right” for a new Recipe, thinking of all the work and care that oftentimes goes into it, only for someone else to take credit whose only effort was copy-and-paste. And it’s incredibly disheartening to be accused of stealing your own Recipes and photos.

Like I said, I don’t really know what to do with that, other than to emphasize the quote in the last paragraph. When you see the same Recipe listed across the internet or in various apps, and you don’t have any idea who actually created it or why (because a lot of different people are listed as the creator), that history, journey, and deserved honor are lost. I’m far from the only one affected by this, because I found several other people’s Recipes (and photos) in the same boat. If you’ve ever created and shared a Recipe, there’s a reasonable chance it has happened to you, too, and maybe you’re not even aware of it. The creators deserve the credit, and those discovering Recipes should have the opportunity to join the journey, and learn the backstory. Both sides are shortchanged, and that’s unfortunate.

I don’t want to end what started out as an exciting and positive article on a sour note, so let me circle back to the top. And maybe this ties the two points together: when the upcoming thing is announced in the coming days, please don’t take credit for it as if you were the creator. I know it’s not you all, that this is preaching to the choir, but maybe one of the people involved will read this by chance (because they obviously come to this website sometimes), and—if so—I hope that it causes a change of heart. Anyway, coming very soon is something that I’m extremely excited to share. I hope that you’re a bit curious, and perhaps a little excited, too. Within a few days, the mystery will be revealed.

8 comments

  1. Sean Sullivan · 4 Hours Ago

    So the big news isn’t a new Fujifilm camera I take it?

    • Ritchie Roesch · 4 Hours Ago

      No, not in the least. That news would come from Fujifilm, or probably Fujirumors first. I have zero inside information on upcoming gear, except in one case Fujifilm sent me a camera (X-T50) to try out just before it was announced. I’m almost always in the dark about that as everyone else.

  2. Minna · 3 Hours Ago

    Sometimes people really suck!
    But all your hard work has been appreciated by so many myself included.
    Just look at the thieves in the present regime standard operating procedure these days

    • Ritchie Roesch · 1 Hour Ago

      It seems like some people are operating under one set of rules, and other people are operating under a different set. I hope that I’m mostly found abiding by the Golden Rule. Thanks for the comment!

  3. Donny · 2 Hours Ago

    I suspect your issue is a bit different… There are very likely people that will “borrow” and publish as their own, but I recall reading just this week that 57% of the content online is AI-generated. I assume that your content is being scraped to be used as content for other ad generating sites, many of which can appear and disappear as quickly as we change socks.

    Not entirely sure what current scraper mitigation strategies are…but I’d be tempted to start there.

    • Ritchie Roesch · 1 Hour Ago

      Oh, I believe that. I get notified whenever someone links to this website, and when the New York Times and Bloomberg linked to Fuji X Weekly in their articles, there were soooo many articles from websites I’d never heard of that were copy-and-pasted. Hundreds. It was crazy.

  4. FRANK FAVALE · 2 Hours Ago

    Isn’t there anyway you can copyright your content? I know anyone can take your information and copy it and post it as their own but there must be some way to protect your IP?

    • Ritchie Roesch · 1 Hour Ago

      So, the photos are copyrighted for sure. I’ve literally (no exaggeration or hyperbole) had tens of thousands of my pictures used in unauthorized (illegal) manors. Finding those and getting them taken down is a daily challenge that feels like a losing battle. I spend hours on this each week. This is a major problem, and a real concern.

      As far as written words, quoting (or even paraphrasing) someone without citation is plagiarism. I think an argument could be made that copying my Recipes and posting them elsewhere without citing the source is plagiarism, but that’s a bit grey (legally speaking), and also there’s not much that can be done about it. As far as the Recipes themselves, I don’t believe that anyone can own them, they’re just camera setting parameters—even if it was possible, I don’t think I would want to do that because the intention is for people to use them (it was never about ownership). I do believe the ethical thing is to give credit where credit is due, but you can’t force people to do that. It’s certainly unethical to copy someone else’s work and claim it as your own (I doubt many would disagree), but morality isn’t necessarily the same as the law.

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