FIST is Magnus Manske's Free Image Search Tool. It is located at fist.toolforge.org/fist.php on the Toolforge.

Purpose

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The purpose of FIST is to find free images which can be added to articles. Lists of articles to find images for can be submitted in various formats. FIST can search multiple sources:

  • Wikipedia links in other languages
  • Wikimedia Commons
  • Flickr
  • GIMP-SAVVY (lots of PD images from the US Gov.)
  • everystockphoto.com (itself a meta-search engine for free images)

Together with a truckload of options (scan title lists, categories to depth X, replace placeholder images) and fine-tunings for the individual searches, it is already likely to be one of the most comprehensive free image (meta-)search tools on the web.

If you know any other sources of free media, I'll be happy to add them, provided

  • they have at least a few thousand images
  • they have an API, or are easy to screen-scrape ;-)

To avoid that images used in templates appear in results, they can be listed on /Ignored images.

Interface

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Scan

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This interface section specifies article titles for which one wants to look for images. This can be done in several ways:

Categories of articles
Will search each given category to the given depth. If there is no article found in a category, it will repeat the search for talk pages (some "image wanted" templates are on talk pages).
Articles
A list of article titles, one per line.
Images to be replaced
A list of images to be replaced, one per line. Each article any of the given images is used in will be searched. Will automatically turn on "All articles" in the Lists section.
Categories of images to be replaced
Same as above, except the images are not given directly, but by category names. Example: The category containing "fair use" images, or the "placeholder image" category.
Random
Random articles. Contents of the textbox will be ignored.

Image sources

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Lists

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