Help:Adding images

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Revision as of 06:06, 4 July 2011 by Voxphoto (talk | contribs) (Flickr images: clarity tweak)
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The method for displaying images within Camera-wiki.org articles is explained later within this page. But before adding any images, first be certain you have read and understood the first two sections about copyrights, and the hosting of images.

Copyright issues

We start by assuming that all images are copyright. Camera-wiki.org only allows display of images if the right to do so is unambiguous.

If you are the copyright holder of the image yourself, you can of course insert it into the wiki. (Please include the standard attribution & rights, as discussed below.)

If you are not the copyright holder, you must assume that any image is copyrighted in such a way as not to allow its use. Images may only be used when one of the following applies:

  1. The copyright holder of the image has definitely permitted its use within Camera-wiki.org (e.g. through submitting it to our Flickr group)
  2. Copyright of the image has expired (see Copyright expiration), and the image has fallen into the public domain.
  3. The photographer has released it into the public domain.
  4. The photographer has released it under the GFDL.
  5. The photographer has released it under a Creative Commons license.

If there is a Creative Commons licence, then the conditions of the specific license must be met: e.g., all Creative Commons images require attribution to the photographer.

Unless either (a) you are certain that an image is in the public domain or (b) you have the explicit consent of the copyright holder, do not take an image to illustrate this site from another site, from a scan of a magazine or even manufacturers' publicity. If you do have this explicit consent, state this clearly on the discussion page of the article in question or in the image's Flickr page if it is hosted there.

Camera-wiki.org uses a set of "image rights" tags to quickly identify the status of an image. These should be included as part of the caption to any image—even your own images added to a page you are writing—because they are a great help to other editors (and potential redistributors of wiki content) in determining the rights status of an image. The meaning of these tags is explained in the following table:

{{creative commons}} for images licensed under Creative Commons Image under a Creative Commons license; check the Flickr image page for exact terms
{{non-commercial}} for images licensed under Creative Commons Image under a Creative Commons license; but explicitly non-commercial
{{with permission}} for images used with permission of the copyright owner image contributed by its creator; or implied permission via adding to Camera-wiki.org Flickr pool.
{{public domain}} for images in public domain image donated to the public domain by its creator, or image with expired copyright
{{fair use}} for images used under fair use this practice is discouraged, please follow the link for the details

Camera-wiki.org will remove images for which ownership and/or copyright cannot be quickly verified. (A simple way to obtain an image of a camera free from copyright problems is to photograph it yourself!)

The interpretation that is currently given in the Copyrights page is that the images are not part of the wiki's content, but are agglomerated documents regarding the GFDL (see section 7, "Aggregation of independent works", of the GFDL). This means that a published image keeps its original licensing status and that your insertion of it within a Camera-wiki.org page does not support a claim that the image is released under the GFDL, or that the image is in the public domain. Please note however that this interpretation might be debatable, and that the careless or unscrupulous may ignorantly or willfully make the fallacious claim that publication in Camera-wiki.org (or any other wiki) implies GFDL or even public-domain status.

April 2011 Note: Many images currently displayed in Camera-wiki.org were originally placed in its predecessor Camerapedia.org. The editors of Camera-wiki.org have worked vigilantly to re-confirm permissions to display "all rights reserved" images in this non-commercial successor to Camerapedia. This process is taking longer than anticipated, and we appreciate your understanding. If you are aware of any image that should not be displayed in the pages of Camera-wiki.org, for any reason, please bring this to the attention of an admin (or one of our Flickr pool moderators and it will be removed immediately.--Vox 09:16, 20 April 2011 (PDT)

Hosting issues

Currently Camera-wiki.org does not host the images that appear within its articles. (A facility to allow direct uploads may be added eventually.) The wiki markup behind each page embeds links to .jpg files that are hosted by other services or web sites.

In addition to considerations of copyright (dealt with in the preceding section), images must be hosted by an organization or person explicitly consenting to having their bandwidth used in this way. This requires you to understand and respect the relevant guidelines and restrictions. In the case of a personal website, you must have explicit permission to link to an image file.

Flickr images

The great majority of Camera-wiki.org images are hosted on Flickr. This is free to join and post images to, and does allow users to link to its images from elsewhere. Camera-wiki.org has set up its own Flickr group. Adding a picture to this Flickr group implies permission for the picture to be displayed in Camera-wiki.org, whether the actual insertion into a page is made by you, or later by another page author. We encourage you to take photos of your own camera gear and (with their permission) that of your friends, and to post the images to this Flickr group.

Whenever possible, images should be drawn from the "Camera-wiki.org" Flickr pool, as permission to use an image is guaranteed there. Photos may be drawn from elsewhere on Flickr only if the specific image is uploaded under a Creative Commons license. (A few Flickr camera-collector groups which may be worth checking include Camerapedia, Your camera collection !, Camera Junkie (G.A.S.), and so on.)

But please note that Flickr's guidelines page states that each picture hardlinked from another site (e.g. Camera-wiki.org) must be provided with a link back to the relevant Flickr page. Images hosted on Flickr are the lifeblood of Camera-wiki.org. Thus, it is vital that we respect Flickr's requirements. At a minimum, Flickr images should be included in the following way:

[URL_of_the_Flickr_user_page_where_the_image_appears URL_of_the_Flickr_hosted_jpg]

An example looks like:

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/vox/238853569/in/pool-camerawiki http://static.flickr.com/89/238853569_aff436e489_t.jpg]

With this wiki markup, a click on the image will directly take the reader to the corresponding Flickr user's page. But: We strongly recommend using camera-wiki.org's Flickr image template, described below.

Prefered Flickr URL format and image size selection

For images from the Camera-wiki.org photo pool please be sure the "image source" URL includes "/in/pool-camerawiki" at the end.

The URL of Flickr .jpg image files encodes the size they display at, using the last two characters before the .jpg file suffix. For a thumbnail sized image, the format would be http://farmX.static.flickr.com/123StringOfLettersAndNumbers_t.jpg; note the final "t". For a medium-sized image, the character changes to "m": http://farmX.static.flickr.com/123StringOfLettersAndNumbers_m.jpg. For a large image (maximum 500 pixels), omit the underscore & letter: http://farmX.static.flickr.com/123StringOfLettersAndNumbers.jpg.

Flickr image template

When adding an image from Flickr to a wiki article, we strongly encourage use of the Flickr image template. In addition to meeting Flickr's "clickthrough" requirement, the template ensures that photographer credits and image rights will be presented in a consistent way throughout Camera-wiki.org.

Clicking the right-most tool button above any editing window (the button resembling a photo) will insert the Flickr image template (shown below) into the page source. Or you may copy this code, and paste it at the correct place:

{{Flickr_image
|image_source= 
|image= 
|image_align= 
|image_text= 
|image_by= 
|image_rights= 
}}

Line by line, the attributes of the template are:

image_source
full URL of the user's web page where the image is presented on Flickr. Please use the URL format ending with "/in/pool-camerawiki" (where appropriate) as this makes it explicit why "all rights reserved" photos appear "with permission."
image
full URL of image file to be displayed (typically a .jpg file)
image_align
center, right or left
image_text
brief caption describing the photo
image_by
photographer, author or copyright holder name. For Flickr users it is preferred to use their real name, capitalized normally, when this is publicly available (screen names may change over time).
image_rights
the image-rights category applying to the image, or its abbreviation[1].

The image file URL (for the image= entry) can be found by opening the Share this box on the image's Flickr page. Next, click Grab the HTML/BBCode. Select what size you want the image to appear in the wiki article. Medium (500 pixels on the long side) is suitable as the main image for an article, where it will dominate the top of the page. The small size is often better if there will be more than one image on the page.

The Flickr interface only permits selection and copying of the entire contents of the text box. But you only need the the URL itself: it should start http://... and finish with .jpg. It may be necessary to paste what you've copied into a separate editor (Notepad etc.) window; then select and copy the image file URL alone. Don't include the quotes around the URL. Paste this into the image= field of the template.

A step-by-step tutorial on how to complete the image template fields (including an alternate method for acquiring the .jpg URL) is shown here.

Image attribution

Attributing images to their contributors using the image_by= field is both a courtesy, and (in the case of Creative Commons images) a requirement of the licensing terms.

The Flickr template does one other nice thing automatically: It adds the page where the template appears to a category "image by (photographer's name)." Clicking the name in the photo caption takes you to a list of other pages with images by the same photographer. (Here's an example.)

For this feature to work correctly, the name entered in the image_by= field must always be consistent. You should check this list to see what category may already exist for a particular photographer. (In that list, note that lowercase names follow capitalized ones.) Then be sure to use the exact same form (punctuation, capitalization, etc.) when filling the image_by= field. When a Flickr user's account shows both a real name and a screen name, Camera-wiki.org generally prefers to use the real name, capitalized normally. There may be a few exceptions to this, based on the preferences of the photo contributor; again, check the list to see.

Arranging images

Optional advanced methods for arranging images are discussed on the page Help:Arranging images reference.

The Flickr image template allows a single image to be positioned to the left or right, or centered within a page. But it may be desired to show several images in a group—different views of one camera, or related models. New contributors to Camera-wiki.org are often unsure how to achieve this.

The MediaWiki software offers a fairly simple syntax for creating tables, described at this MediaWiki help page. While tables would typically be used for text elements, you may also create a table where each "cell" is a complete Flickr image template (as described above). This combines several images together into a block, which you can position within the page. This may be the simplest method for grouping images if you aren't familiar with other web markup standards.

The three images seen at the right of this page are grouped together in a column, which is created using wiki table markup, as shown below. In wiki tables, the "pipe" character plus a dash begins a new row.

{|align=right
||
 {{Flickr_image
 |image_source=http://www.flickr.com/photos/lux4u2/5511997808/in/pool-camerawiki
 |image=http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5300/5511997808_6b33199b4d_m.jpg
 |image_text= 
 |image_by=Lux4u2
 |image_rights= With permission
 }}
|-
||
 {{Flickr_image
 |image_source= http://www.flickr.com/photos/siimvahur/5639564271/in/pool-camerawiki
 |image= http://farm1.static.flickr.com/92/207807911_2b4e4b9e4d_m.jpg
 |image_text= Chinon CA-4
 |image_by= 
 |image_rights= with permission
 }}
|-
||
 {{Flickr_image
 |image_source= http://www.flickr.com/photos/siimvahur/5640137658/in/pool-camerawiki
 |image= http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5142/5640137658_923bd935a9_m.jpg
 |image_text= The same camera as above
 |image_by= Siim Vahur
 |image_rights= with permission
 }}
|}


Below, this is repeated without the parameters, to copy and paste:

{|align=right
||
 {{Flickr_image
 |image_source=
 |image=
 |image_text=
 |image_by=
 |image_rights=
 }}
|-
||
 {{Flickr_image
 |image_source=
 |image=
 |image_text=
 |image_by=
 |image_rights=
 }}
|-
||
 {{Flickr_image
 |image_source=
 |image=
 |image_text=
 |image_by=
 |image_rights=
 }}
|}

The align parameter at the top can take three values: right or left for a stack of images floated to the right or left of the text, and center[2] for images centred in the page.

if the images aren't all the same width, you might want to use the parameter image_align within the Flickr template (center, left or right) for a neater appearance. Otherwise that line can be omitted from each template, as is shown here.

If you don't specify the image_text, image_by and image_rights parameters, they won't appear. In some cases, you might want to fill these in just for the last image, if one caption is appropriate for all the images. This may make a neater appearance; however, if the images are under a Creative Commons license, image_by and image_rights are required to be present under each image (all Creative Commons licenses require attribution).

Image-arrangement options

When you examine the markup behind different existing wiki pages, you will find a wide variety of markup styles for embedding images (according to each author's own preferences and technical abilities). Don't feel you must become an expert in all these forms of syntax. You can also copy the code from a layout you like, and substitute the image URLs and caption information you need on your page. Some other options for arranging images follow. The page Help:Arranging images reference shows some more complex variations.

Table, prefix and appendix

Note that the arrangement of images in the sample above is achieved with help of wiki markup for tables ( elements {| |- || |} ). The template {{br}} (giving a page break) can be used as "prefix" to move the table of images below any other page elements that precede it. You can use {{br}} as appendix to the table code too, to assure that any page contents that follow are pushed below the images.

Three in a line with one caption

This code uses an excerpt of the Flickr_image template above, used with a row of three images to add a common caption:

{|class=plainlinks align=center
 ||[http://www.flickr.com/photos/century_graphic/5486260029/in/pool-camerawiki http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5013/5486260029_bdb32b4727_m.jpg]
 ||[http://www.flickr.com/photos/century_graphic/5486263919/in/pool-camerawiki http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5134/5486263919_40fb9cc6d3_m.jpg]
 ||[http://www.flickr.com/photos/century_graphic/5486864606/in/pool-camerawiki http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5213/5486864606_3da76eac14_m.jpg]
|-
| colspan=3 align=center |
{{Flickr_image_caption
 |image_text= This caption is shared between three images of a Zenit 1.
 |image_by= Dustin McAmera
 |image_rights= creative commons
 }}
|}

This arrangement has the advantage of using only one short template. Each cell contains a Flickr page address and its .jpg image file URL, separated by a space and enclosed in square brackets. The template Flickr_image_caption gives a single caption, for image groups all from the same photographer (and with the same image rights). As you may have guessed, "colspan" means that the caption spans three columns of the table structure. If you put a different number of images in the row, change the number colspan=3 to match.

The result of that code is this:

Here is the same syntax again with the fields empty, to copy and paste:

{|class=plainlinks align=center
 ||[ ]
 ||[ ]
 ||[ ]
|-
| colspan=3 align=center |
{{Flickr_image_caption
 |image_text= 
 |image_by= 
 |image_rights= 
 }}
|}

Again a table structure is used to arrange the images. With tables, the group of images keeps its arrangement even if the browser window is resized to a width narrower than the table.

Notes

  1. Allowed image rights tag name abbreviations when used in image_rights attribute of Flickr image template
    public domain: pd
    non-commercial: nc
    commercial: $
    creative commons: cc
    with permission: wp
    fair use: fair
    alternate abbreviations are with permission: (C) or (c), creative commons: CC, public domain: PD
  2. You have to spell it center, not centre.