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

# 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,<ref>Which is why we don't simply let people use images hosted on sites other than Wikimedia Commons on this site.</ref> 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 [[Our Lawyers Advised This Trope|most importantly, according to our lawyers]]), the licensing/copyright information for the site where you got the image. This one is "optional"<ref>It's optional in that the software will let you upload a file without it, but wiki policy says it's required for legal reasons.</ref> (sort of; you're going to need the licensing information later), 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,<ref name="Wikimedia">All The Tropes has the ability to reach directly into Wikimedia Commons, so you don't need to download an image from that site and upload it to this one. Just pretend you already downloaded and uploaded the file, and go straight to "Adding the Image to the Page" in order to use the file.</ref>, or DeviantArt, the license information is usually right inon the image page, and you can easily copy it.

It's often a good idea to resize images before uploading them; making an image anywhere between 350 to 450 pixels wide is usually ideal. Image height is far less critical unless it is ''much'' wider than it is tall, in which case you might want to consider a different image or crop the one you have. This isn't essential - you can set a maximum width later by using the thumbnail markup on the wiki page where the file will be displayed - but shrinking a huge image will leave more disk space for other images later. ''(Moderator tip: If you're running Windows, you can use the freeware program [https://www.irfanview.com/ IrfanView] to resize images cleanly, and to convert them to JPG or PNG format so that they can be used on the wiki. That software has literally been around for decades and as of 2020 is still being supported. Windows PowerToys also includes an image resizer among its features. And there are also any number of websites that offer image-resizing services.)''

Uploading an image is a simple process. Over in the menu along the left edge of every page in most skins, 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.

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 and select the image you want to upload.

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 "ZZ8762346222A.JPG" or if we already have a file with the same name -- you can revise the destination name as you see fit.

** 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". Don't forget to list in the summary box whatever license terms they specified, if any.

* If you got the image off Wikipedia or Wikimedia,<ref name="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 codetag <nowiki>{{tl|fairuse}}</nowiki>. for files that are not available under a free license or in the public domain. ([[:File:Jobcomedy.jpg|Here's an example.]])

* If you're uploading the image for use on a work page, put the name of the pagework here.

* If it's a poster for a movie - not a DVD case image, but an actual theatrical poster - please add the category "Lobby Card".

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 and before the page quote (if the page has a quote) and the description text. (Unless the page has an infobox, in which case, see "If the page has an infobox" below.) If there's a {{tl|Needs Image}} template on the page, delete it and put your image there. (On a Characters subpage, an image of a character goes just below the header that names the character, and above the character description and trope list.) 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

If your image is small enough -- no larger than 400-450500 pixels horizontally -- you can then finish the markup like this:

If it's bigger than 400-450500 pixels horizontally, you're going to want to shrink it. It's a vector image (SVG format or something else) that needs to be scaled, you'll have to set the image width. There are a couple ways of doing this; we suggest you use this markup unless there's a reason not to:

This is good practice, though not required, if you know the work the image comes from and that work has a page here - or, if it's a photo of a real person, you know who the person is and we have a creator or Useful Notes page for that person. (Although it's pretty obviously unnecessary if the image is ''on'' the work's or creator's page.)

Finally, ifIf you want to add a caption to the image, that's simply done by adding yet another vertical bar followed by the text of the caption before the two closing square brackets. You can mark up the caption pretty much any way you want, including links to other pages, using the usual Wiki syntax. You can even add HTML line break tags (&lt;br/>) if you really need to.

At this point, all you have left to do is save the page -- after [[All The Tropes:Edit Reasons and Why You Should Use Them|noting in the edit reason]] that you've added a page image -- and you're done.

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