What to do after uploading an image to Wikimedia Commons: transcript

Key points

• Add categories when uploading, even if you change them later, because categorized images are easier to find.
• If a person has a Wikidata item but no Commons category, create the category with the Wikidata infobox, then add the Commons category and image properties on the Wikidata item.
• For people with no Commons category and no Wikidata item, such as those photographed through WikiPortraits, create a new item using the multiple-languages label code and basic properties like instance of human, gender and an IMDb ID.
• Captions on the Wikidata image let the Commons infobox display in other languages, such as French or Italian.
• Wikipedia templates such as Commons category, sister project links and Wikidata-based infoboxes pull from Wikidata and appear in many language editions.
• Categorizing the image, attaching it to the Wikidata item and specifying the Commons category greatly expands where the image is used.

Chapters

1. 0:04Adding categories when uploading an image
2. 1:12Case 1: Wikidata item but no Commons category
3. 6:18Why a category with one image is still useful
4. 6:57WikiPortraits and red-link categories
5. 9:37Multilingual captions in the Commons infobox
6. 10:56Case 2: no category and no Wikidata item
7. 14:42How Wikipedia reuses Commons data via Wikidata
8. 19:20Key points and recap
9. 20:57Questions on labels and languages

Full transcript

0:04Okay. And okay. So if you're here for you uploaded an image to Commons, now what? You're in the right place. I will mention that I'm going to augment this slide presentation with two things. I had forgotten to put the, you know, the share alike or rather the essay Creative Commons.

0:42There's a commons attribution on it, and there are image credits that I will add. Okay, so the best thing you can do when you're uploading an image is you're going to, you know, if you're doing the usual upload, it's going to prompt you for categories. And if you know categories, you know, put them in even if you're going to change them later.

1:12So that's a best practice because it always helps to have your image in a category on Commons because that helps to make it more discoverable by others. Okay, and let's see if I can get rid of this. Okay, well, I'm just going to move that out of the way. Okay, that should be safe down there. All right, so the case 1A, this person has a Wikidata item, but no commons category.

2:00So, what we're going to do is we're going to start by creating the category. So, this category is for, whoops, excuse me, forgot that I was in the presentation. So, for Camellia Loyal Ash Suo. So, this was, who is this person?

2:31And this was the founder of the Hawaiian Red Cross, and she was also the wife of the minister. To why, when it went from the change from the Republic of Hawaii, to becoming the territory of the Hawaii with the United States. And I'm mostly using her just as an example for this process. So what are you going to put when you go to creating the category? What are you going to put in the most important thing right now is the wiki data info box.

3:06But I already know that there are two good categories for her, so I'm going to add those categories and create that. So when you do that, you will get an error because there's no Wikidata ID found. That's because we haven't made the connection yet. So this is okay at this stage because we're going to take care of that. But you will also notice that down here at the bottom, you know, we have the categories in place.

3:41So we have already something linkable from this category. So this is the next step. But now we're in Wikidata. Okay, so we're going to add three things. The first is the commons category, Cameo, Loyal, Ash, Sewell. So you see that at the top. That's the most important thing, because that will make that Wikidata info box that we put into the category earlier, that'll make it work.

4:19but we also want to attach the image an image you know it could be if there were multiple images in the category we would just simply select one um and so we want to put that in as uh the image property and so you see uh see here where you know it has been added and then finally uh this is kind of a nice to have step but it's not as necessary as the other two things there is a category the commons category property in wikidata so to be just to be complete we're and dad died as well and here we are back at The Commons category page for Camellia, Loyal, Ash, Suo. So you notice now we have a nice Wikidata infobox. And where does all this data come from? Well, it's all in the Wikidata item. All these properties are coming from there.

5:29so just by doing those few steps now we have something that can be really presentable as a category does anybody notice what's missing from the category we have no files yet so we need to go take care of that that is this next step we have uh what we've done what i did was i went to the file the portrait of camellia loyal ash sewell and i added this category to that file and i removed the other two categories because those parent categories are now present in this category.

6:18Some people will ask, well, is it useful to have a category with only one image? Well, actually, I know that there are other images of her out on the Internet. I've had problems getting to the correct source. But because I know that there is a newspaper announcement of her wedding to her minister husband, and I've seen that in a genealogical database, I know that I can add that. So ultimately, there will be more than one.

6:57so this has anybody here uh worked with wiki portraits okay well i know is do most people here know what wiki portraits is okay well i'll i see a couple hands i'll just explain for the rest of you um there are many personalities who had simply bad photographs on wikipedia a lot of these people might come to book festivals or film festivals or sporting events so wiki portraits was a group of photographers that banded together and also because of wiki portraits wiki portraits will provide information to the event to get press credentials for these photographers and the whole idea is that these photographers then can now show up at say the red

7:58corporate event. Or other events at the film festivals, book festivals, etc., and take pictures. So this was a picture that was taken pretty recently, earlier this month, as a matter of fact, at the Venice Film Festival. So this has appeared as in the category Wiki Portraits at Venice Film Festival 2026. These people often will sometimes either have no category about them or a red link category.

8:37And if you look down here in the lower right, you will see that there is a red link category for this person. So we want to go, you know, create the category. I already showed you how to create the category. and you know here on the wiki data item i'm showing the three uh some of the things that we've added um so the uh the multilingual site commons category that's kind of scrolled off uh but you can see i added an image i i added the uh excuse me it's a little hard to see here Okay, yes, so I went ahead and added the image in the Commons category property, but you will notice under the image there are two captions.

9:37This top one is in English and this bottom one is in French. So, now if you go and take a look, once this has been done, you go take a look at the category on Wikimedia Commons. i don't do you notice anything different from the previous uh uh commons category that i displayed the previous one i is displayed in english here i've chosen french for the commons category so now you see that um info box on the right there it is all i don't know if you can make it out at this at the distance you're sitting at but it's but it is all in french and it is displaying the french caption uh for this person so now on the case two No commons category, nor a matching Wikidata item. So this is kind of small to see here. There's a file history. You see this. This is, again, Wikiportraits at Venice Film Festival 2026.

10:56this image is coming from, you know, I basically have gone to Wikidata. I've tried to find Floriana Pinto, and I have not found anything. I will mention that there are other two other presentations that are relevant to this. One is using Wikipedia Films and Filmmakers Red Links to seed Wikidata.pdf, And the other is adding authority control properties and Wikidata for writer and artist biographies.

11:31You'll find those useful for creating a new Wikidata item. Those were presentations from Wikiconference North America 2024, so you can find it in that category on Commons. Okay, so the basic filmmaker item here, you know, we are creating a label for this. How many people here have edited Wikidata? Or how many people and created a Wikidata item? Are you aware of the MUL language code?

12:12So I chose the MUL language code here. MUL stands for multiple. So this is the default language code, or it'll be the default value for the label for all languages. So you can come in and you can put in a Chinese label. That makes sense because it's not Latin script. but in terms of Latin script any language like French or Spanish or Italian it just makes sense to have the default because that the default Latin script will be the same for all these languages so that's that's why over here on the the right you see default for all languages however I did to also put in The description, the English description, because I, you know, I'm working in English, that makes it useful. And I probably did also put in the Italian description. But the, you know, the very basic stuff you need for a filmmaker, instance of human, sex or gender, yes, we do care about that, female.

13:26and the imdb id i wanted to get at least one what's called linked data into here that's that means that this wiki data item links to another database where you can find additional information about her so it's really hard to see here but on the left is the wiki data item where now i have I've entered a number of different properties. One of the things I've also done, if you see the pictures in the category, you will notice there is one that's been cropped on the left.

14:06So I cropped that because that's more appropriate to use in an info box. And one of the things I did in the Wikidata item was when I put the image in, I put the captions in, in English and Italian. And in this case, I have chosen Italian as the display language here on Commons. And you can see, you know, everything that's being displayed in the info box is in Italian.

14:42so one of the things i want to call out here is when you're doing this this makes it available to more languages this makes your images available to to more people and more languages okay so what's wikipedia use from wikidata in common so i'm going to start with english wikipedia There are a couple of common templates that normally go under external links or whatever the last section heading is in the article.

15:21And one is the most commonly used is Commons category. So you see, that's this one right here. And then, but also, comments category inline is used a lot of times, and that's used with a bullet. One I like is sister project links. So if you have other projects that are involved, Wikimedia projects, like for instance, here for Maxfield Parish, he has media from comments, quotations from Wikicode, and text from Wikisource.

16:02and you know basically this syntax sister project links um you know pipe auto equal yes automatically pulls that up in the article so that's that's one use um of using data from wikidata in commons why do i say wikidata because wikipedia goes to wikidata to find the commons category and it also will find sister projects categories if you're using sister project links okay these templates appear in many different wikimedia projects so this is just showing you that commons category in line that appears in these ones that are displaying plus 102 more. Commons category, these ones that are displaying 248.

17:00More languages. And the sister project links is similar. You know, we have all these that displayed in 131 more. So this, this really gives more power for reuse. Okay. And then there are Wikimedia project info boxes that use Wikidata. There are 101 in NWIKI, English Wikipedia. The template infobox person slash wikidata, that appears in 52 different Wikipedias.

17:38The template wikidata infobox, which we saw being used on commons category, that can be used in 37 different projects. and what does that buy you uh okay so here is the wiki data info box excuse me uh the info docs person slash wikidata template um being used in seven different languages so this is all pulling data from Wikidata. And the image is there because the image is attached to the Wikidata item. And I just happened to find out about this one day. I just happened to upload this particular photograph. It's a cropped photograph to Commons. I said, it would be nice to have the Wikidata item have an image attached to it.

18:38So I did that and I went back to the file and comments and all of a sudden I noticed it was being used in, you know, a number of Wikipedias. So if you want to really expand how your image is being used, this is the way to do it, is to categorize, attach the image to the Wikidata item, and then make sure that the commons category is also specified in Wikidata.

19:20So key points, commons categories, they make your images more discoverable. On commons, via Wikidata links, and via templates. When you populate commons multilingual sites in Wikidata, it can then display, you can use templates to display data in commons categories and commons category Wikilinks in inter-wiki templates.

19:53and adding image parameters to the wiki data items that enables display and info boxes that retrieve from wiki data so this all furthers the use of images and data you upload and i also just want to go back to let me go back to uh let's see let's see this one so when i created the category i put in wiki data infobox and i put in information about you know female screenwriters female film producers uh projectionists what i did not put in was the surname or the given name or the birth that is all in wiki data and wiki data infobox pulls those categories in so yeah When you start doing this,

20:57It really kind of pulls together data from different projects. So that's basically, that's my presentation. Is there any questions? Okay, and I think somebody's in here at 3.45, right? 4.45, I'll do a break. Oh, okay. I need a break. Well, take a break. When I create a new ID, I create a new ID, I only use it in English and Spanish.

21:55I don't have a lot of collaboration. Yeah, and that's fine, because the potential is that somebody else can come along. or sometimes somebody might come in and use Google Translate to create more labels. And sometimes I'll use Google Translate to produce Polish, not Polish, Ukrainian, because Ukrainian is a Cilic, I believe, script. It's not Latin. Any other questions? All right. Thanks.

Source and licence

Recording: File:You uploaded an image to Commons—Now what.webm by Peaceray (2026-09-25), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.