It wasn’t the war in Gaza, the bloodstained entrance of an orphanage or starving children in Angola. Not mourning widows in Bangladesh, or infant female circumcision in Guinea-Bissau. It was the strain of an endlessly multiplying tweet. Someone had taken one of her photos from the Internet and made it the face of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign. After nearly 20 years of award-winning reporting in over 80 countries, Ami Vitale came to the brink of leaving photojournalism over a tweet.

This is not the story of a misappropriated image gone viral. This is the story of what happened next.

When a photo is published on the web, it falls into nimble, anonymous hands that upload and share millions of images each day. Context becomes a casualty. Its loss threatens photographers’ reputations, may endanger their subjects, and chips away at journalistic credibility. If a photojournalist’s responsibility is authenticity, her challenge is control.

James Estrin opened this conversation in “The Real Story About the Wrong Photos in #BringBackOurGirls” on The New York Times’ Lens Blog May 8, shortly after the offending tweet metastasized. Three days later, Duckrabbit Blog’s John MacPherson, using a Google reverse image search, revealed that Ami’s photos were everywhere. And when Ami conducted her own search, she found broken promises with each click of the mouse.

“It literally stopped me in my tracks,” she said in an interview with Ochre. “There was a week I thought this was enough: I’m quitting. And then I realized that this was actually just a call to action to try to educate people, protect yourself and the people you photograph as best you can.”

From now on, she decided, she would tell her subjects “We do live in this very different world than it was 10 years ago. Are you OK with knowing that your picture might be all over the Internet?” Then she began a climb to reclaim her work. It was “an uphill battle … every step of the way.”

In the end, she acquired survival skills every photographer should learn: Monitor your photos. Know your legal rights and use them. Involve the media. Speak your piece. Work to educate the public. And at some point, let go.