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Wikipedia:How to upload a photo

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There are at least three issues to be considered:

  1. First is the licensing aspect of using the image. In order for an image to be used at Wikipedia, the image must be unambiguously licensed to be compatible with Wikipedia's free-use licenses, which are CC BY-SA and GFDL. To simplify this, the images have to be licensed such that they can be copied and used (with attribution) by anyone, with no restrictions against commercial or other use. The owner still retains their own copyright, but allows Wikipedia, and all of Wikipedia's downstream users, mirror sites, etc. to use the image again with proper attribution. Permission to use an image only in a specific Wikipedia article is insufficient. Make sure the owner of the copyright understands this, and have them (and yourself) review the information at Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials, which includes instructions on how to properly document permissions for Wikipedia to use these images. There's also a page called Wikipedia:Image use policy which exhaustively covers Wikipedia's image use policy.
  2. Second is the uploading of the image. Once the licensing is taken care of, the image should be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons which is the media repository for all projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, including Wikipedia. While it is technically possible to upload the image locally to English Wikipedia, we recommend against it because 1) it can't be used by other projects, including (for example) other language Wikipedias who may want to translate the article and use the image in their language and 2) If you upload it locally and it is properly licensed, it will just be moved to Commons anyways, and uploading it directly to Commons saves everyone extra work. See This page for a tutorial on how to use Commons.
  3. Third is the adding of the image to the article. To do so, you would add the following code to the article: [[File:IMAGENAMEHERE.jpg|thumb|right|CAPTIONTEXTGOESHERE]] First is the file name. Second is the word "thumb" which indicates that the image is a thumbnail; which allows for appropriate resizing and bordering (without this code, the image gets placed full resolution, which is bad for most articles). Third is either the word "right" or "left" indicating where you want it to go. Fourth is the caption, which would be the text you want to place under the image. There are other options you can use for sizing and location, and all sorts of stuff, but that's extra stuff and not really necessary. You can read ALL about the full range of image options, and how to code for them, at Wikipedia:Picture tutorial if you wish.

Fair use is a legal doctrine which provides that for certain classes of use of (non-free) copyrighted material – such as for educational, criticism, news reporting and other purposes – there is an exception to the rule that the material cannot be used without infringing on the owner's copyright, even though you don't have their permission. Certain standards must be met to fall within the bounds of the doctrine's exception.

The most common way fair use comes into play here is in direct quotations. When you see a quote in an article from some source and that source is not in the public domain or freely-licensed, we're using that copyrighted text without the owner's permission, under a claim of fair use. I won't get into the details of the standard too deeply, but suffice it to say that you can't use too much of the work under fair use, so the rule of thumb is short quotations are generally okay, and large ones are probably not. For images (and other media files), we have a set of the standards that a work must meet in order for it to be properly claimed as fair use here, that are provided at Wikipedia:Non-free content criteria. It can be complicated but to summarize some salient points from them that come up a lot:

  1. We only allow uploads of non-free images if no free equivalent is available, or could be created – which means in practice: 1) if a relatively poor but free image is available to us, a better but non-free image cannot be uploaded; and 2) with some exceptions, a non-free image of a living person cannot be used at all, because while the person is alive, there's always the potential of a free image being created by someone by simply snapping a photograph;
  2. We require minimal usage – which means in practice: 1) we don't allow multiple fair use images to convey information, where one is sufficient; and 2) we use only enough needed, a part if sufficient from a larger whole, and a low resolution image that can still be functionally useful, even if the original is of high resolution; and
  3. We only allow fair use images in articles, and never in behind-the-scenes pages (like this one).
The place where most fair use images come into play is in (lo-res) album covers, movie posters, book covers – things of that nature that are unlikely to ever be free (until their copyright expires) and for which there are no useful free equivalents. By the way, as noted above, the Commons is only for free image, so fair use images must be uploaded here and not there. Hope this helps.

See also

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