Commons:Preguntas frecuentes

Galleries are a complement to categories (primary way to organize and find files on the Commons), as another way of displaying media. They allow files to be annotated with captions, shown at better sizes than the category default, organized in tables, etc. Typically they begin with short captions that briefly introduce the topic in many languages (these can be automatically generated using MultiDesc), followed by headed sections that typically use the <gallery> tag (see meta page for guidance).

The files should be followed by interwiki links (also generated by Sum-it-up) and at least one category. Gallery pages must be in at least one category.

A good way to design a new gallery page is to adapt an existing one from a similar topic. Species (plants/animals) pages will necessarily be different to location (cities/countries) pages.

Authors may change their Creative Commons licenses and sometimes do, but their license at the time of verification cannot be revoked. (See the Creative Commons FAQ: What if I change my mind about using a CC license?) If an upload from Flickr has a verified CC BY or CC BY-SA license, the file remains on Commons. However, the template {{Flickr-change-of-license}} might be added. Works identified on the image page as a new version of a verified file also remain. Verification appears in a FlickreviewR, administrator or trusted user notice on the image page.

Gallery and userspace pages can be moved by logged in users by using the "move" link usually shown at the top of the page (this depends on the skin you use). Note that this feature may not be available to new users; if needed, just ask someone to do it for you.

Categorization should answer "W-questions", most importantly: What is it? Where is it? A file should be put in the most specific category/categories that fit(s). We don't use general keyword tags like "nature" or "architecture" to organize files.

There are several ways to find appropriate categories (or gallery pages).

If unsure, choose a more general category. However, unless a picture has additional important elements to it that are currently missing their own subcategories, avoid categorizing pictures into both a subcategory and one of this subcategory's more general parent categories. See Commons:Categorías for more information.

Sometimes, pages are placed in categories not manually by Commons editors, but by means of a special editing tool called a template, which can be used to place identical information (including category membership information) on many different pages at once. When the information on such a template is edited, the pages containing that template are not necessarily updated immediately. This means that pages might not always appear in the most current categories. However, this problem usually affects project maintenance categories rather than the categories used for browsing.

Various other temporary delays may sometimes mean that lists of category members or subcategories, or the page counts given, are not completely up to date. So if you are editing Commons and find that your page hasn't yet shown up in a category or been removed from an old category, don't panic! The problem will probably resolve itself within minutes, or after a longer time in rare cases.

Try to copy the existing structure when expanding categories. Make sure each new category has at least one parent category. See if your area has a category scheme, or if there is one you can model yours on. Especially for species and countries, the structure should follow the conventions set by existing structures. For more information about categories on Commons, see Commons:Categorías.

You can create a user gallery either as a subpage of your user page (so if you are user Foo, put your gallery page at User:Foo/gallery), or as a category (called something like Category:Pictures by Foo). All user galleries should be in Category:User galleries, all user categories should be in Category:User categories – see Commons:Galerías, plantillas y categorías específicas de usuario for details. To find all the pictures you have uploaded, you can use the upload log.

See meta:Help:Images#Rendering_a_gallery_of_images for information on how to create galleries the easy way – with the <gallery> tag. The page Commons:Galerías might give you information on common conventions of galleries here on Commons.

Commons uses "caching" to display pages more quickly, which occasionally makes it show copies of pages and thumbnails which are not up to date. "Purging" is a way to force Commons to recreate a page from its database, rather than relying on the cached version of the page.

See Help:Purge, en:WP:BYPASS, and en:WP:PURGE for more details.

Yes! Take a look at our guides about video and audio.

It might be a thumbnail problem (see the question above), or you might run an ad-blocking software that mistakenly thinks the image was an advertisement. Can you see File:D-fructose.png? If not, then that's the likely cause of your problem. That image resides at the URL https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/D-fructose.png which contains the string "/ad/". Your ad-blocker is probably configured such that it considers all images with a URL containing this string to be advertisements. Change the configuration such that this rule does not apply to the .wikipedia.org and .wikimedia.org domains. That should cure the problem.

The file may be too large to give a thumbnail (e.g., a large JPG in progressive mode). See: Commons:Formatos de archivo#Size and scaling.

Look at Special:MediaSearch or Special:Search and follow the links there. For more advanced searching see Help:Search and Commons:Accesorios#Search. You can also go to related articles in the different Wikipedias and look at what pictures they are using. Some may already be on Commons, and they should be categorized, giving you a hint where to look for more.

See Commons:Accesorios, Commons:Gadgets and Commons:Errores.

Yes. The UploadWizard allows you to upload a batch of files at the same time.

There also is a number of popular standalone batch-upload tools that you can install on your computer.

If you use Lightroom, Darktable or Digikam, there are even extensions for directly uploading (batches of) images from within your editing software available.

For those comfortable with the Unix command line or Python, there is a number of upload scripts for batch uploads available as well.

Galleries and other standard pages: yes. Accounts older than four days can rename articles by using the 'move' tab at the top of the page. Note that for different language titles, redirects should be created rather than moving a page.

Files (Images): Yes, but only by administrators or users with the filemover permission. Please see § How can I rename/move an image or other media file?.

Categories: no. If the badly named category is still a likely one (rather than a misspelling), the badly named one should be converted into a soft redirect by tagging it with {{Category redirect}}. The images in the category have to be manually changed to belong to the new category. (Cat-a-lot is a gadget which makes such mass recategorisation easy.) Note that due to technical restrictions, categories should all be in English.

Make sure that the file you're uploading has an extension and that it is one of the allowed types. Make sure also that you have not left a space either before or after the point.

Be sure to include an extension in the Destination filename: field as well. For example, write "Orange grove in summer.jpg" not just "Orange grove in summer".

The file you tried to upload contains some HTML code in its metadata. Most likely, you tried to upload a JPG file, and the HTML is contained in the file's Exif data. Because of security concerns, such files cannot be uploaded.

You'll have to remove the HTML code from the file's metadata. You will need to have access to software that allows you to edit such metadata. One way to do this is via exiftool. This is a very powerful command-line program to edit image metadata. If you're using a computer running the Windows operating system, there is also a graphical user interface to that tool called ExiftoolGUI.

If the file you tried to upload is from Flickr, you can view (but not edit) the metadata on Flickr. For instance, this Flickr image does have HTML in its metadata and will thus provoke this error message. You can view the metadata by appending "/meta" to the URL: this image's metadata. The "Caption-Abstract" metadata entry contains HTML-code: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier,_New_Zealand#1931_earthquake">Wikipedia</a>. That's the bit you'd need to remove. (Yes, that's just a harmless link. But with HTML, one could try to do more nefarious things, and thus our software simply forbids any HTML in image metadata.) Download the Flickr file to your computer and then remove the HTML from the metadata.

Once you have removed the HTML from the image's metadata, you should be able to upload the file. (Do not upload this sample file from Flickr, though, it already exists as File:Central Hotel, Napier 05.jpg.)

Unfortunately at this time, the only options are to have the local file deleted, or re-upload the Commons image under another name, or ask for either the local image or the Commons image to be moved to another name. If the local image is renamed, the leftover redirect may need to be deleted as well.

Firstly, you can only do this if your account is older than 4 days.

Secondly, consider uploading to a separate file unless the changes are relatively minor. See Commons:Sobrescritura de archivos existentes.

If you are still intent on uploading a new version of a file, you should have the new version of the file saved to your computer, then navigate to the image page here on Commons. Under the subhead "File history", there is a link that says "Upload a new version of this file". Click on this link. You will be taken to a page titled "Upload file". Scroll down to the middle of this page to a box labeled "Source file". Next to the words Source filename is a button marked Browse.... Click on this button and browse your computer to find the new version of the file. Do not alter the entry under Destination filename:. Under File changes, indicate what changes you have made (e.g., "hi-res version" or "removed background noise" or "fixed colour balance")— just one line is enough to say what changes your new version contains. Lastly, click the Upload file button. A warning will appear telling you that you are replacing an existing file— as that is what you want to do, you should continue.

Avoid overwriting images with different images of the same topic.

Below the "File history" section are two "file usage" sections, one titled File usage on Commons and another titled File usage on other wikis. These two sections will list all instances on Wikimedia Foundation projects where your file is currently in use.

In last couple of years Wikimedia Commons has been working hard on localization or internationalization (aka. i18n) of most of the text a user might see on any page. The goal is to show the content in the language of the user's choice. The current upload process, which creates a lot of new text visible on each page, was written before the current push for internationalization and creates all the headers and other standard texts in the language of the uploader, and since the software supports many different languages, new images are created daily with text in all those languages. In order to correct the problem, some automatic processes (aka bots) patrol new uploads, changing the text to code which will automatically show the text in the language of the user's choice. Some of the changes you might expect to see on files uploaded (using English language for these examples) are:

Some discussions on the subject can be found here and here.

As explained in the above section, the wiki-text of the new file uploads is created directly by the server-side upload program (a php script). It can only be fixed by changing the Mediawiki code. The problem is well known, but it is unclear if there are plans to fix it (as of Nov 2009). Some recent discussions on the subject can be found here.

This is most likely the result of an error in the file's EXIF data (also called its "metadata"). See Commons:Rotation for information about fixing this problem.

If your image appears upside down or needs to be turned by 90°, click on the Edit tab on the top of the file page. Then scroll down and type {{Rotate}} somewhere in the edit window. This will add a "rotation" template to your file (if you know exactly how you would like the image rotated, add that information to the template per the instructions below). Finish by clicking Publish changes at the bottom of the page. After a couple of hours, a bot will automatically rotate the image (losslessly, if possible).

RotateLink is a default gadget to add a link “(  request rotation)” to file pages, which allows you to easily (automatically) request any rotation.

Manual way:

If you request a rotation by another value (e.g. 5°), the image will be placed in Category:Images requiring rotation for processing by humans. Maybe an editor will take the time to rotate it – can take some longer time.

No. Not good. Turn it off. It's much better to just let your camera store things like this in the file's Exif data – most devices will do that automatically.

And how are they computed?

If you go to some file on a MediaWiki installation, say File:Spelterini Blüemlisalp.jpg, and you click to view the full version, you may discover that the file resides at the URL https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/Spelterini_Bl%C3%BCemlisalp.jpg. (The "%C3%BC" part is just the result of url-encoding the Umlaut "ü".)

You can create a copy of the timed text page containing the transcribed subtitles, changing the language code in the timed text page to your language code. Then you simply translate the text. See Commons:Timed Text#Internationalization.

When uploading a file you may see an Internal error: Bad token. error message. This will usually be fixed by logging out of Commons, closing your browser, and starting again. If not, you may additionally delete all cookies (or just the wikimedia.org cookie) and purge your browser's cache before trying again. If this still does not solve the issue, try turning off ad blockers or network filters (sometimes the token could look like an advert URL).

If you want to stop using Commons, then no special procedure is needed: simply stop visiting the site. Accounts cannot be removed completely, but some measures can be taken for privacy. See Right to vanish.

See the pages listed at Commons:Deletion.

In some cases, uploads can be blocked by Commons:Filtro de abuso.

Commons is very interested in working with projects that have similar aims. See Commons:GLAM for details.

Most importantly, some Wikipedias have a less strict licensing policy than Commons, as some pictures that would not be acceptable to Commons would be okay on them. Commons does not (and cannot) allow fair use content, as some Wikipedias do. See Commons:Uso justo.

Unfortunately, users who don't know English well may have a harder time on Commons. Commons tries to supply information in many languages, but non-English pages tend to be incomplete or outdated. Also, some things, like the names of categories, can't (yet) be localized. Sorry.