Wikimedia upload tutorial

First things first

1. Sign up for an account at Wikimedia Commons.

2. Once you have your account up and running, add a subpage of your user page for your image gallery. To do this, add an in-wiki link to the subpage user:username/gallery from your user page. This will create the page and make a link on your main page, killing two birds with one stone (or link). So, if your username is XYZ, you would add [[user:XYZ/gallery]] to your page.

3. Add your gallery to the user galleries category. Simply tag the bottom of the page with [[category:User galleries]].

Adding images

Now that you have a gallery set up, you'll probably (hopefully) want to upload images for people to use.

1. Make sure that your image is in a useable format. Preferred image formats are .png, .jpeg (for photographs), .svg, and .gif (for animations only). A list of supported image formats can be found here.

2. Use the upload tab in Wikimedia. An important thing to note is that Wikimedia does not check for repeat filenames, which means if someone tries to upload a file under the same name as yours, your file will be deleted. To avoid this, try to use unique filenames. For example, you can tag images with your username so that other users are less likely to accidentally overwrite them. For example, instead of uploading a .png and naming it "skull", which is a fairly common name, I can call it "nlee_skull". This also makes it very clear who originally uploaded the file.

3. After uploading the images, put them in your gallery for everyone to see. You can use the following html template:

<gallery caption="title of image batch" widths="X px" heights="Y px" perrow="Z">

image:image_name.filetype|description

image:image_name2.filetype|[[wiki link]] description

</gallery>

Where image_name.filetype corresponds to the images you want to show (for example, if I wanted to put in my picture "nlee_skull" I would put image:nlee_skull.png|This is a skull I designed for someone.). X is the desired width (in pixels), Y is the desired height (in pixels), and Z is the desired number of images per row. Note that dimensioning will be applied uniformly, creating a grid of identically sized images.

4. Link to this gallery in relevant situations.

"Help! I can't ___!"/FAQ

You can find general help files at the Wikimedia Commons FAQ. Image specific help can be found here.