Choose one blog and one source task
You want to recover your own original project announcement, not every reblog discussing the project. Confirm which of your blogs published it and note a distinctive phrase or the kind of post you remember.
Keep the selected blog address with your notes. A shared display name or a phrase repeated in a reblog does not establish that you found the original source.
Use the search inside the blog
Tumblr documents opening a blog by clicking its name or avatar from the dashboard, then using the magnifying glass at the top. After entering a term, choose Original to hide reblogs. Top and Recent change the ordering, and post-type controls can limit the results to text, photo or video. Source
Start with the remembered phrase and inspect the results. Add the Original filter when your task is specifically to recover a post created on that blog. Select a post type only if you know it; an uncertain restriction can hide a useful candidate.
Avoid carrying syntax between different searches
The same Tumblr help page warns that global-search operators such as from:, year:, date: and match: do not work in in-blog search. It also says this search indexes only the first 20 tags on a post. Source
| Search choice | Use it for | Keep separate |
|---|---|---|
| Selected blog | The blog you have opened | A site-wide search |
| Original | Excluding reblogs | Independent verification of authorship |
| Recent | Viewing newer matches first | The date of an event described in a post |
| Post type | A known media format | A guess based on a cropped preview |
If a query fails, first check the search box and restrictions you used. Do not keep adding unsupported operators and interpret the empty response as evidence that the post was removed.
Open the candidate before citing it
Read the complete candidate, its displayed source and any quotation inside it. “Original” is a platform filter; it does not mean that every sentence or image in the post originated with its publisher.
For an illustrative studio announcement containing a supplier quotation, record the announcement as the studio’s post and attribute the embedded quotation separately. Do not turn two appearances of the same wording into two independent confirmations.
Save the actual post address and the supporting passage. Use the screenshot-text checklist if OCR supplied the phrase, and the source-review guide if the post will support a wider summary. This task does not require changing blog visibility or exposing private posts.