Commons:First steps/Sorting

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First steps
First steps tour Understanding Commons Creating an account File uploading License selection Tips & tricks A perfect upload Sorting of files Tools that make life easier Useful media software Third parties Reuse of Commons' media files

First steps

First steps tour

Tips & tricks

Third parties

Reuse of Commons'
media files

How to sort and categorize images

Other people need to find your file in order to use it to illustrate articles in other Wikimedia projects. So it is crucial to add your media files to specific categories and/or specific gallery articles on Commons, otherwise your valuable media files won't get used that much. An example of a gallery page could be the image gallery of the planet Mars. You can tell if a page is an article or a category by looking at its name. Pages without a prefix are article pages, pages with a "Category:" prefix are categories and pages with "Image:" are image pages. This concept with these prefixes is called "namespaces". That way you can separate easily different contents.

[edit] Adding images to categories

Adding an image to a category is done like adding a Wikipedia article to a category. Simply place something like the following example code at the image page itself:

[[Category:Some specific category]]

Be as specific as possible. Don't add an image to an overcrowded root category. In order to find a right category for your image, the category tree function will help you a lot: just go to a general category, such as Category:Countries and then follow the subcategories until you find the most specific one that describes your image.

[edit] Adding images to galleries

In order to add an image to a gallery go after upload to the gallery article, click there on "edit" and you will see among other things something like this:

<gallery>
Image:Mars Valles Marineris.jpeg|Valles Marineris on Mars
Image:Mars Hubble.jpg|Mars seen by the Hubble Space Telescope, Realistic Colors
</gallery>

Which looks like:

Valles Marineris on Mars

Mars seen by the Hubble Space Telescope, Realistic Colors

You can add your image between those two gallery-tags (one opening and one closing tag) in the following way:

Image:Your photo name.jpg|A brief description

After saving the article you will now see your image as thumbnail in the gallery. Unlike in the normal case when you incorporate a single image into an article you don't use the [[- and ]]-brackets around the image. For sound and video files it works the same way except that the media files will display a replacement icon like in this example: