Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 2/Uploading a photo

So this was just a very general introduction to Commons. Specifically for uploading your photo, how do we do that? There is an upload button. On the Commons home page right here on the right. This button. You click the upload button, you are taken to the Upload Wizard. You click the select file button and you navigate on your device to the file you want to upload.

Then you fill a little form that that asks you questions like what is the date? What is the category? What is the license? of the file you're uploading. Make sure you pick a meaningful name. Don't just call it "photo17" or, you know, "scan004". Give it a good descriptive name. Don't be afraid of giving it a very long name. A name like "Black Star Square from the north at night.JPG" is a good name, because I know what to expect even before I click this file name, right? I know that it'll probably be a photo of the Black Star Square in Accra. We just demonstrated that you need to pick a license. The default license is a good choice unless you have very good reasons to select a different free license. There are some other free licenses available, but they're all free licenses. Again, you cannot restrict the files on Commons, and upload them not under a free license. Upload the best version of the file that you have. Even if you think, "wow, that is super huge. This photo is ten megabytes," or whatever it is. That doesn't scare Commons. So by all means, go and upload the best quality you have, the best quality your equipment created, whether it's a camera or a phone or whatever it is, don't compress or convert it.

All the image formats you can think of are supported. And if you are interested, if this sounds like a contribution method that you're interested in pursuing, there is a link here on this slide to an on-wiki tutorial that's also translated into other languages. There's also a video tutorial that really takes you through the steps of uploading a photo.

And if you say, "well, this is nice, but what could I take a photo of? I'm not in Paris by the Eiffel Tower. What could I possibly take photos of?" I have two pieces of good news. First, the Eiffel Tower is already very well covered. We actually don't really need too many more photos of the Eiffel Tower. On the other hand, your hometown may not be very well covered. So this page, this last link here on this slide is actually going through a lot of ideas for what to take pictures of, right where you are. It can be your, say, local post office, the grocery store, the kinds of decorations that are used in your part of the world. That page has a lot of ideas on what might be notable, interesting, valuable photos to take. So I encourage you to click that, if you're interested in photography but are not sure what you could contribute.