All The Tropes:Uploading and Adding an Image to a Page

If you're reading this, it's a safe bet you've noticed that a lot of pages here at All The Tropes have pictures on them, and you'd like to add a picture to a page that doesn't. Great! That's the kind of proactive and community-oriented thinking we like to see here on the Wiki. But maybe you're not sure just how to do that. Well, have no fear: what follows is a step-by-step guide to the process.

Select an Image

Now presumably you have an image in mind already. But if you don't that's okay. We have a page here called How to Pick A Good Image which will help you pick something that works. Just make sure that when you add your image to the page it'll be more than Just a Face and a Caption.

Once you've picked something, download it to your computer.

Important Information About The Image

We're presuming that you've used Google or another tool to find a cool pic to upload. That's fine. But after you download that image and before you leave the site where you found it, you need to make a quick note of two or three things that you'll need when copying the image to the wiki:

The URL of the original image. This is very important. We've already had at least one catastrophic loss of data since 2012, and as part of that we lost a lot of images. Having the URL where you got the image handy lets us retrieve a new copy if something like that happens again. Most browsers let you right-click on the image and pick a menu option reading something like "Copy image location" or "Image address".
The URL of the page the image was on at the website where you found it. You can get that right from address bar of your browser. Nothing is permanent on the Web, after all, and this gives us a way to find the image through the Wayback Machine should the website have disappeared by the next time we need to get a copy of it.
Finally (and most importantly, according to our lawyers), the licensing/copyright information for the site where you got the image. This one is optional, not because we're willing to take the fall for you if legal issues raise their hoary heads, but because some sites make it all but impossible to actually find this information. If you can't find it, don't sweat it. But please make the effort. If you're copying the image from Wikipedia or Wikimedia, the license information is usually right in the image page, and you can easily copy it.

Once you have it, stash this info in a text file -- you're going to need to copy'n'paste it in a later step.

I Created This Image

If you're the original artist, fantastic and thank you. In that case, you probably already know where your artwork is on the Web, and don't need to make a note of it. You also don't need to make a note of the licensing terms.

Image Names

A lot of websites use long strings of letters and numbers for their filenames. We'd rather not have that. Before you upload anything to us, please rename it to something human-readable that's somehow relevant to the image's content and/or origins.

Uploading the Image to the Wiki

Uploading an image is a simple process. Over in the menu along the left edge of every page, there is a link reading "Upload file". (It's actually there twice, once at the top, the sixth item, and once more down under the "Tools" submenu at the bottom.) Click it and it will take you to a page where you can pick the file you want to upload on your computer, add a description, pick a license type, and add categories.

Let's go over these in a little more detail.

Source File

In a separate bordered area you will see a button marked "Choose File". Click that and with the file open dialogue that appears navigate to the image you want to upload.

File Description

Here's where you get busy.

Destination filename

This will be automatically populated when you select your file. This is your last chance to change the name to something human-readable if you left it as something like "ZZ-8762346222-A.JPG" -- you can revise the destination name as you see fit.

Summary

Probably the second most important area to fill out. Those two URLs we asked you to stash earlier? Put them here, with enough text to make it clear which is which. If it came from a work, mention that. If you know or have a pretty good idea who the actual owner of the image is, put it here. (It's okay to be uncertain, as long as you make a good faith effort in trying to identify the owner.) Add anything else about the image that you think might be useful, important or simply of interest to another wiki reader.

Here's a good example. Here's another.

Licensing

Tucked under a block of blue-tinted buttons which insert boilerplate markup into the Summary box, you will find a drop-down list labeled "Licensing". It defaults to "None selected".

This is the most important control on the page other than the "Choose File" button. You must select a license when uploading an image. This is a legal requirement for the wiki, and repeatedly uploading files without choosing Licensing for them will get you tempbanned.

Now that we've scared the crap out of you, let's just tell you it's not that hard. Here's what you do:

If you're the original artist, thank you again, and select "I created this image myself." This also applies to images you created by combining and editing other images to a sufficient degree that they become a derivative work, like this one.
- If you got the image from the original artist and they gave you permission to use it on the wiki, choose the very last option, "This file is copyrighted, but use is permitted by the copyright holder".
If you found the license information at the website where you got the image, scroll through and find the entry that matches it. If you don't find anything, don't panic.
If you got the image off Wikipedia or Wikimedia, pick that option -- and you'll need to go back to the image's page and get the license terms explicitly given there if you didn't already get it all earlier. Copy them into the Summary field, along with the code {{fairuse}}. (Here's an example.)
If the image is old enough to no longer be under copyright -- which is probably older than you think, because US copyright terms start at 70 years these days -- or the original creator gave up his copyright, choose "Public Domain".
If nothing matches the information you got from the original website, or you found nothing at all, pick the first option, "This will be used in a way that qualifies as fair use under US law.", also simply just called "Fair Use". This option is almost always safe to use if you have no other information at hand, but it requires that the wiki use the image on a page somewhere. If an image is marked "Fair Use" but isn't used, it will probably be deleted by an administrator sooner or later.

Finishing the Upload

Once you've picked your file and filled in all the blanks, hit the "Upload file" button at the very bottom of the page. In a few seconds your file will up on the wiki. The top of the page will have a banner that reads "File:Name of Your Uploaded File.jpg". Highlight that and copy it.

Adding the Image to the Page

Compared to what you just went through, this part is easy. Go to the page where you want that image to appear and edit it. Insert a blank line where you want the image to go -- for basically any page, the first image is always at the top, and goes on the second line, under the page type markup. Type two left square brackets, and then paste in the filename you just copied from the page you came from. The line will look like

<nowiki[[</nowiki>File:Name of Your Uploaded File.jpg

If your image is small enough -- no larger than 400 pixels horizontally -- you can then finish the markup like this:

[[File:Name of Your Uploaded File.jpg|frame]]

That's a vertical bar, the word "frame" and two right square brackets. "frame" puts a border around the image and positions it flush against the right edge of the page, which is where we want page images to be.

Thumbnailing the Image

If it's bigger than 400 pixels horizontally, you're going to want to shrink it. There are a couple ways of doing this; I generally use this markup unless there's a reason not to:

[[File:Name of Your Uploaded File.jpg|thumb|400px]]

Vertical bar, the word "thumb", another vertical bar, "400px", and two right square brackets. This means "put a thumbnail image 400 pixels wide inside a frame and make it flush against the right edge of the page".

Then save the page -- after noting in the edit reason that you've added a page image -- and you're done.