User:Arpingstone/Sandbox

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HOW TO UPLOAD A PIC TO COMMONS, AND DISPLAY IT ON WIKIPEDIA by Adrian Pingstone, Bristol, England.

INTRODUCTION This is how I do my graphics work after having uploaded about 2000 pictures (at December 2007). (WP means Wikipedia)

I'm going to deal only with pictures that are your own property and that you don't mind anyone else using in any way they want (even including publishing for profit). This is called Public Domain (PD). The complexities of copyright therefore do not concern me and won't be mentioned here.

EDIT THE PICTURE IN YOUR GRAPHICS PROGRAM I use Paint Shop Pro Photo 11. I correct for the following possible imperfections:
Remove tilts due to camera being held sloping, remove skew due to looking upwards at a building (also called perspective error), clip for a better composition, remove any sensor dirt with the clone tool, remove any colour cast, correct it if its too light or too dark, sharpen and degrain.

Check that the processed picture is below 4.0MB (a sensible size).
SAVE AS to wherever you like on your computer (so long as you remember where it is!) with a useful name (ie don't use P278654987.jpg, I add my initials (arp) to every pic). The example picture I'm going to use is called "pantheon raphael bust arp.jpg".

CHOOSE PICTURE CATEGORIES SO THAT OTHERS CAN FIND YOUR PIC AND USE IT ON THEIR LANGUAGE WIKIPEDIA Your picture is most useful if it's put on the Commons image database and not so useful if it's on the WP image database. The reason is that a Commons image can be used by any language WP but an image uploaded to WP image database has to be reuploaded from scratch if needed on another language WP (which is tedious).
Go to Commons Category Index, found at this URL: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AAllpages&namespace=14

Next, have a guess at some likely Categories to try out in the Category index. I guessed “Raffael” and “Pantheon” and from there the Categories Index let me refine it to “Pantheon in Rome” and “Raffaello Sanzio”.

USE A WORD PROCESSOR TO WRITE THE IMAGE DESCRIPTION INFO AND THE PICTURE CODE Go into a word processor (Word, Works, Notepad, OpenOffice are common ones) and prepare two things. FIRSTLY the information that is revealed when the picture in the article is clicked (what it shows, date it was taken, copyright status, your name etc) and SECONDLY the code that must be edited into the article so that the picture appears in the article.

Here's my information and code for the example picture. The first bit is information that will appear to the reader when the picture is clicked:

Bust of the painter Raphael, above his tomb in the Pantheon, Rome, Italy
Photographed by Adrian Pingstone in June 2007 and placed in the public domain
{{PD-user|putyourusernamehere}}
[[Category:Pantheon in Rome]]
[[Category:Raffaello Sanzio]]

The second bit (when embedded in the article) makes the picture appear in the article:

[[Image:pantheon raphael bust arp.jpg|thumb|right|Bust of the painter Raphael, above his tomb in the Pantheon]]
(I've only used italics to make the above material stand out, you don't)
(Technical note: an additional bit of code giving the thumbnail size (eg 250px) used to be used but is now undesirable because the desired thumbnail size can be set in Prefs by the reader and, while the commonly used 250px might be OK for a screen 1024 pixels across, it's too small for my 1600 pixel screen so I've set 300px in my Prefs.)

UPLOAD THE PIC TO COMMONS Next we need the "first bit" (above) put into your computer's clipboard for later use, so highlight it on your Word Processor page, right click and COPY.

Go to the Commons Upload screen which is at URL http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Upload

Delete the stuff already in the Summary Box (not needed) and instead type into it a very brief summary such as “Raphael bust”. Click on BROWSE and navigate to the file on your computer that contains the picture. Double click on the pictures filename and it will magically appear in the DESTINATION FILENAME box.

VERY CAREFULLY CHECK that the filename is exactly what you expected because this is the last time that you can change it, before it whizzes of to Wikipedia's storage computers.

Click UPLOAD FILE and wait.

After up to a minute the picture will appear on your screen. Now you must paste in the "first bit" stuff you just put into the clipboard so click EDIT (the EDIT just above the filename), get the cursor into the edit box, right click and PASTE. Get rid of your temporary summary (which will be lurking somewhere in the Edit Box).

Click PREVIEW to see how the reader will see the page (the page is officially called the Image Description page) and check that the Categories are now live links (on my computer they must be blue). Alter and PREVIEW the "first bit" stuff until you like what you see. Click SAVE PAGE and off the picture goes to Wikipedia's computer. That screen is done with, so close it.

Now go back to the the word processor screen and SELECT and COPY the picture code (the bit that starts [[Image........) that I've called "second bit" above).

PUT THE PICTURE CODE INTO THE ARTICLE Go to the article in WP itself, click on EDIT at the top of the article and paste down the code wherever you think best. Use PREVIEW to see if you like what you see. Don't forget an Edit Summary something like ”Pic added of Raphaels bust in the Pantheon”. NOTE: consider if the picture looks best on the left or the right of the page, and make the caption informative.

When happy hit SAVE PAGE

JOB DONE!!