User:GiorgioGaleotti

Hi, my name is Giorgio Galeotti, an amateur photographer based in Reggio Emilia, Italy.

Most of my photos are here:

• Wikimedia Commons: My Wikimedia Commons contributions.
• Giorgio Galeotti Photography: My personal site containing many photos that cannot be published on Wikimedia Commons due to legal restrictions or non-encyclopedic nature.
• Flickr: Where I re-publish photos that are a bit more "artsy".
• Facebook: My social bit!

Photo Licensing & Usage

I frequently receive inquiries regarding permission to use my photos. Please note that I cannot provide legal advice or individual "permission letters" for specific use cases.

All my contributions to Wikimedia Commons are released under a Creative Commons license. Please refer to the specific license listed on the file description page to determine if your intended use is permitted.

Attribution Requirements: If the license requires attribution, please use the following format:

“Photo by Giorgio Galeotti + what the particular CC license requires”

Philosophy

Most of us have thousands of photos in their drawers, hard disks, the cloud, cell phones...

Many are family photos but many could be valid documents of how a place, a monument, an animal or an event were at the time.

Unfortunately prints and slides fade.... we fade... and eventually, one day...

Hard disks break down or are thrown away by the heirs. Cloud subscriptions and web spaces expire and are deleted if not renewed.

Except for famous photographers, if photos are kept in a drawer, on the PC or some cloud, sure enough, they'll be gone forever!

Wikimidia Commons and archive.org (maybe there are others) are the only ways I know of to have photos and documents with some encyclopedic/historic value preserved for posterity.

So, I started uploading old photos that fit this encyclopedic/historic concept here. Now, wherever I go, I find myself taking mostly photos with Wikimedia in mind!

Furthermore, everytime somebody shows me their photos, family or otherwise, I always see some that could fit Wikimedia perfectly.

Maybe they are not exceptionally composed or the colors are off, but they are nevertheless great documents of how a place or some exotic animal were at the time.

So, at the risk of waxing boring, I always try to explain to them the concepts above and maybe convince them to upload to Wikimedia!

Now for the technical stuff.

Titles and descriptions

All FileNames follow the same scheme: Title - Location - Date Shot

Location is where the photo was taken from, i.e. not the portrayed location!

For example: a telephoto shot of Toronto taken from Niagara on the Lake (on a very clear day) will say "Toronto Skyline" as the title and "Niagara on the Lake" as the location.

Descriptions are usually the same as the Filenames without the date.

Location Names & GPS

Most location names are derived from a combination of not always accurate GPS fixes and various on-line sources.

Hence locations may not always be perfect, especially near regional borders.

I mean: Italy has 110 Provinces, subdivided into more than 7800 Municipalities (Comuni), each one with many fractions and scores of villages. Hence, a little error in GPS fixes or in maps will make you end up in the wrong Comune, fraction or village, especially in the mountains. The rest of Europe is not very different!

Furthermore, many small municipalities are joining into larger ones with sometimes different names...

Therefore, location names are what I find on on-line resources on the day I edit/publish the photo.

If the photo was taken a year ago and the name of the place changed in the meanwhile, the location will be the name of the place at the time of publishing.

GPS fixes in EXIF data, if any, are what was recorded at the time of shooting and, at most, I correct them a little to compensate GPS errors.

If the GPS fix is on a border, I will use the name of the place where the subject of the photo is.

For old slides and photos taken prior to GPS technology I do my best to find their locations using various on-line resources.

I do the same thing when i forget to turn the GPS tracker App on my phone.

Then I set the position in the EXIF data of the photo before publishing it on Wikimedia.

If later on I realize the position was wrong, I fix the Wikimedia entry, even though this does not change the photo's EXIF data.

In other words: when not the same, Camera Location in the Wikimedia page is more likely to be accurate than the position in the EXIF data.

Of course: if you find any errors in the GPS position of my photos, please feel free to fix them!

Canals, rivers and other bodies of water

I take and publish a lot of pictures of canals, rivers and other bodies of water I run into but it's not always easy to give them the proper names.

On-line resources only have names for the largest ones so I have to look around the Internet for maps and PDF files, usually from the local authorities that manage the resources.

Sometimes different documents give the same feature different names.

Even worse: the name on the map is often different from the name on the road sign.

Furthermore, nouns like "river", "stream", "creek" and so on are often used at random.

In Italian it doesn't get any better: "torrente", "fiume", "rio", "cavo", "fossa", "colatore", "canale" and so on are mostly the opinion of the cartographer!

Anyway: if I don't find anything, I just call it "Canal" or "River" or whatever.

Therefore: please, feel free to correct the descriptions of my water photos if you have better informations than me.

Time and Date

The time on all my cameras (except the phone cameras) is set to GMT (most of the time).

Color space

All my monitors are calibrated with a sRGB tone curve and a luminosity of 120 cd/m².

All photos are saved in a sRGB color space.

P.S. I rarely wait for the perfect light. If I did, I'd take at most two photos a day!