Here’s a tip: Citations can be difficult, but they don’t have to trip you up. Below we explain how to cite a photograph in MLA format in all these situations. Likewise, if you want to reproduce an image in your paper and give proper credit to the source, you also follow different guidelines. If you’re citing images you found in a museum or art gallery or images from a book or journal article, you use a different set of MLA citation guidelines. However, if you didn’t find your image online, it’s a different story. Note that this formula applies to both primary and secondary sources. In-text citations for images and photos in MLA format simply list the creator’s last name in parentheses, like so:Īs long as you found your image online, those are the basic formulas for how to cite a picture in MLA format. This remains true even if you’re paraphrasing the source material, although in that case it’s recommended that you run your excerpt through a plagiarism checker. Īs with other sources used in academic writing, you need to include in-text citations for images referenced in your paper.

In practice, your works-cited-page citation should look like this: In MLA format, you drop the “ or “ from the URL and start with “www” or whatever text comes first. A helpful tip to stay organized is to write down the URL in your essay outline when researching so you don’t have to go back and search for it later. If you found the image online, writing the URL is a necessary part of how to cite a photo in MLA format. If the image has no title, you can write a basic description of the image, without quotation marks, in its place. Note that the image title may be in italics instead of quotation marks if the work is a painting or photograph. “Image title.” Website name, Day Month Year of posting, URL. If you found a picture online-whether a photograph, digital image, or any other visual-follow this formula for citing a picture in MLA format: Grammarly helps you communicate confidently Write with Grammarly Those of you familiar with how to write a research paper or how to write a report already know that citations on the works cited page must follow a specific format.

How to insert a citation for an image