UPDATED 2/24: There have been new developments to this story. Here are my thoughts.

Last week we all experienced the brouhaha over Tumblr suspending five accounts whose primary focuses were to parse posts of a few select Tumblr users. It seems another conspiracy is brewing this week. Only this time it’s on Flickr.

Flickr users Rosie Hardy and Aaron Nace “met” on Flickr while they both were participating in photo projects where they were supposed to take and upload a picture of themselves every day for a year. According to them they started following each other’s updates, which led to e-mails between the two and blossomed into a full-blown e-romance. Nace eventually flew across the Atlantic to meet Rosie in London in person.

As the relationship progressed they each turned their Flickr accounts into blogs and word about their story spread. Soon each were getting thousands of hits and hundreds of comments on every photo they uploaded. Nace eventually started a blog detailing touting his processing abilities and taught classes online via Skype. Their recognition got them a lot of interviews with media outlets, including a profile 10 days ago on MSNBC that fawns over their story.

Apparently not everyone bought into the story and some investigation has revealed that multiple images Hardy uploaded — and allegedly profited from — are nearly identical recreations of other artists’ work without any type of attribution. A user started the Rosie Hardy Plagiarism Tumblr as the official anti-Rosie destination after Flickr routinely deleted comments critical of Hardy.

Hardy posted an image today with an apology after being outed for not attributing those who have inspired her and is claiming to be taking a break from Flickr for a while.

It remains to be seen what’s going to come of the whole situation and whether it really was just some type of elaborate marketing ploy a la Lonelygirl15 as is alleged comments in this discussion thread, but I’m interested to see what happens since I’ve been following Hardy’s photostream for the better part of a year now. I never really bought into the idea that she was capable of producing the images she posts with a program like GIMP, especially with as little training as she claimed to have, but I never knew things were going to come to a head like this.