Do you ever feel bad about stealing photos to illustrate your writing? Especially now that you sell stories for profit?

Short answer:
Yeah, with some caveats. 

Long answer:
Let’s take care of your strawman arguments first. Number one, I have never sold a story for profit. I ask for support in the form of monthly donations, and in return I post stories for free, and a small number of stories for limited readers through Patreon. None of that is “selling stories” in any sort of conventional sense–its more like a paywall than anything else. Furthermore, the stories on Patreon (i.e. the only stories that require payment to view) don’t contain pictures at all, and won’t contain pictures in the future. So I’ve never profited off the pictures here, in any real direct sense. Indirectly? You could make a flimsy argument I suppose, but the fact is, every image story can be accessed for free, so how can I be profiting off the photos themselves?

Number two–that word “stealing.” Its true that I don’t own the copyrights to the photos I post, however, I believe than my use of these photos falls within fair use doctrine, and therefore isn’t stealing. I don’t claim to own the copyrights to any of these pictures–in the past, if people have requested it, I’ve removed the photo in question, and will continue to do so. We can have a more complex discussion about whether or not what I do constitutes fair use or not, but it certainly isn’t flat out theft–i.e. me claiming to own the copyrights to photos I don’t own the copyright for would be “stealing,” which I’m not doing. 

But do I feel bad? Yeah. I wish I had the time and resources to effectively source and give credit for photos, but the way reblogging on tumblr is structured makes it difficult to do so easily, while still providing the form of content I want to put out. For example, it’s impossible to reblog two photos from different posts in one single post, and it’s impossible to reblog a photo and insert it into a text post. Further, reblogging itself is often sketchy–I have no way of knowing whether the original poster in the reblog chain owns the copyright to the photo they posted–often they don’t. 

Personally, I’d really like to use fewer pictures in posts. If you look through my archive, you can see that the number of photos I use has dropped pretty substantially. I’d much rather have someone like or reblog my story because they like what I wrote, and not because of the picture I attached to it, and so that’s probably where we’re headed in the nearish future.

In conclusion, the premises of your accusation up there are pretty flimsy at best, but yeah, I would very much like to better source the photos I’ve used to supplement my stories on tumblr. But I don’t have the resources to do so, and tumblr’s limited toolset for crediting sources is extremely limited and deeply flawed anyway. At the end of the day, content we post to the internet is content we’ve lost control and ownership over. If you don’t want people using and sharing it, then keep it off there in the first place. If your property is so important to you, then why risk it so casually?