Wikimedia Commons Images
Penny Dale
The presence of a resource on this list does not guarantee that all or any of the images in it are freely licensed and/or in the public domain: you are still responsible for checking the copyright status of images before you submit them to Wikipedia.
Normally all images are declared as protected by Copyright. It will be necessary to see case by case which ones are already in the public domain or with expired Copyright (e.g. old photographs and reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works).
If you are browsing Commons for the first time, you may want to start with Featured pictures, Quality images, Valued images or Featured media.
You can also see some work created by our highly skilled contributors in Meet our photographers and Meet our illustrators. You may also be interested in Picture of the Year.
The National Gallery of Art has long been committed to making its art freely available to the world through its open-access initiatives. In 2018, the Gallery began extending this commitment by working with the Wikimedia Foundation, one of the largest supporters of open knowledge and culture, to donate its collection of open-access images and data to Wikimedia platforms to support open culture, research, and education. To date, the Gallery has contributed 53,000 high-resolution images of artworks to Wikimedia Commons and 120,000 art object collection records to Wikidata.
By donating its open-access collection to Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata, the National Gallery of Art continues to make its art freely available to world-wide audiences. As new images come into the public domain, they will be added to Wikimedia Commons. The Gallery welcomes and encourages everyone to explore, enjoy, share, use, re-use, and build with its collection on Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.
Pictures of the day will be chosen from Featured pictures of Commons. Featured pictures are the finest images on Wikimedia Commons and are selected by consensus on Commons:Featured picture candidates. Pictures of the day should be selected from images that were strongly supported during the nomination process. For instructions on how to add a Picture of the Day, see Commons:Picture of the day/Instructions.
As stated above, recommended attribution depends on the medium you're working with. For media such as offline materials, video, audio, and images, consider publishing a web page with attribution information. For example, on a webpage featuring your audio recording, provide a credit list of material you used that adheres to best practices above. Doing so allows not only your material, but the materials you attribute, to be found by search engines and other web discovery tools. If possible within the medium, make the Author, Source, and License links the user can follow.
Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone, in their own language. It acts as a common repository for the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, but you do not need to belong to one of those projects to use media hosted there. Wikimedia Commons may look and feel familiar to you because it uses the same wiki-technology as Wikipedia, and everyone can edit it.[1]
Use the filters in the horizontal menu to sort the results of your search. You can search for audio and video files as well as images. You can search for images by license (including images in the public domain), file type, and file size. Using the Community Assessments menu, you can also search for images that have been featured on the site or for images that the Wikimedia Commons community has seen as valued or high quality.
Every day a new image is selected for display on the main page as the Picture of the day. These striking images come from all over the world, and you can view all of them going back to November 2004.
Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org) is one of the platforms within the Wikimedia family of projects, which includes Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, MediaWiki (the software on which all these projects run, as does the OpenStreetMap wiki) and other projects. It hosts most of the images, videos, audio and other media files used across Wikimedia projects, and these files can be directly used also for example on this wiki. Note that Commons content furthermore may be used by anyone, anywhere and for any purpose [2].
Mapillary and OpenStreetCam photos are available under a license compatible with Wikimedia Commons. If you notice a photo in either site that does a good job of illustrating some place or structure, you can manually export that photo and upload it to Commons to make it accessible to a wider range of use cases. The Mapillary 2 Commons tool can be helpful to import Mapillary images to Commons.
Wikimedia Commons photos can be useful for map mashups. For example, Sophox displays an image gallery or an interactive map featuring images in popups whenever one of the output columns contains Commons files. A user can click on an OpenStreetMap feature to see more detail about the feature, including a photo of it.
Pages on this wiki can automatically obtain images from Wikimedia Commons as if they were uploaded here. As long as a media file is available under a license compatible with Commons, you should upload it to Commons instead of using the Special:Upload tool here. There is no need to reupload a Commons image here.
Starting on Thursday December 4, 2008, Wikimedia Commons witnessed a massive upload of new images. Wikimedia Commons received more than 80,000 files from a donation from the German Federal Archives. These images are mostly related to the history of Germany (including the German Democratic Republic) and are part of a cooperation between Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archives.
These images are licensed Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Germany License (CC-BY-SA). Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archives have signed a cooperation agreement that, among other things, asserts that the Federal Archives owns sufficient rights to be able to grant this kind of license.
To our knowledge the donation of 80,000 images is the single largest one to Wikimedia Commons so far and we are very hopeful that this is only the start of a long lasting relationship that might serve as an example to other archives and image databases.
Is it possible to add Wikimedia Commons images in the questions/answers without uploading them on imgur? Since the images on Wikimedia Commons are free, it's a waste of hard drive space to upload them on imgur just to be able to show them in a SE question. I've recently asked a question where I provided links to two Wikimedia Commons images but I would prefer to directly include them in the question - without uploading them on imgur.
Its worth remembering why we encourage the use of imgur - if wikimedia changes their links or OP removes the image your image is broken. In future, if SE chooses to move off imgur, it also simplifies the process of fixing links. There's many advantages to using imgur, and space is relatively cheap.
The only requirement is to cite the author/license (example), an easy task, but we are totally failing at it. Only maybe 1% of Commons images used here are properly cited. That makes our use of these images illegal, and it could expose Stack Exchange to various legal threats.
Wikimedia Commons is a repository of free images and other media.Many Usługi hostingowe MediaWiki allow for usage of images and media in articles by entering the file name as if the file was uploaded to the local server.
Any images (photographs, sketches, maps) used in the Wikipedia article should be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons first. Use your Wikipedia username & password to log in, then upload your files. Be aware that once your images are a part of Wikimedia Commons, it can be used by others in Wikipedia or elsewhere, depending on what license you assign to it.
There are millions of subjects you can read about on Wikipedia. But of all those subjects, the ones relating to Africa have the least coverage. This is due to a number of reasons, but some are linked to the fact that many people do not know that they can have their knowledge and cultures reflected on Wikipedia by donating their images, videos and audio to Wikipedia.