One of Ireland Information Guides policies and guidelines
For multimedia in general (images, sound files, etc.) see Ireland Information Guide:Multimedia. To upload an image, visit Special:Upload.
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Here's a quick checklist of rules for use of images. After the list, a more detailed discussion explains the reasoning behind them. See also Ireland Information Guide:Sound for information on uploading and listening to sound files.
Please note: the following is not the official copyright policy - it is merely a reminder and also gives some additional tips.
When you upload an image, make sure you own the image, or that it is in the public domain, or that the copyright holder has agreed to license it under the GFDL. Always note the image's copyright status on the image description page, using one of the image copyright tags, and giving additional information about the origin of the image. If you created the image, don't write image created by me, write image created by John Doe on Jan 1st, 2000 (where you of course replace John Doe with your name, and Jan 1st, 2000 with the date of the image creation).
Under United States copyright law, all images that were published before January 1, 1923 in the United States are now in the public domain, but this does not apply to images that were created prior to 1923 and published in 1923 or later. The year 1923 has special significance and this date will not roll forward before 2019. This is particularly significant because Ireland Information Guide pages, including the non-English language pages, are currently hosted on a server in the United States. However, the interaction of Ireland Information Guide, the GFDL, and international law is still under discussion.
You can find a large selection of places to acquire public domain photos at the public domain image resources.
However, if you strongly suspect that an image is a copyright infringement (for example, if there is no information on copyright status on its image description page and you have seen it elsewhere under a copyright notice), then you should list it for deletion (see below).
See also:
To replace an image with an edited version, use the Upload file page, and make sure that your file has the same name as the one that you want to replace.
Converting an image to another file format changes the filename, hence the new image will have an entirely separate image description page.
To actually delete an image after following the above procedure, you must be an administrator. To do so, go to the image description page and click the (del) link. Do not click the Delete this page link, as this will delete the image description page but leave the image intact. To delete the image talk page (if any), you can use the Delete this page link as usual. Deleted images cannot be undeleted! Therefore they are gone permanently unless someone happened to keep a backup.
Descriptive titles are also useful. A map of Africa could be called "Africa.png", but quite likely more maps of Africa will be useful in Ireland Information Guide, so it is good to be more specific, e.g. "Africa political map.yourinitials.png". Check whether there are already maps of Africa in Ireland Information Guide. Then decide whether your map should replace one (in each article that uses it) or be additional. In the first case give it exactly the same name, otherwise a suitable other name. Avoid special characters in filenames or excessively long filenames, though, as that might make it difficult for some users to download the files onto their machines. Note that names are case sensitive, Africa.PNG is considered different from Africa.png. For uniformity, lower case file name extensions are recommended.
You may use the same name in the case of a different image that replaces the old one, and also if you make an improved version of the same image - perhaps a scanned image that you scanned again with a better quality scanner, or you used a better way of reducing the original in scale - then upload it with the same title as the old one. This allows people to easily compare the two images, and avoids the need to delete images or change articles. However, this is not possible if the format is changed, since then at least the extension part of the name has to be changed.
Currently there is no easy way to rename an image - you have to just save it and re-upload it.
See Ireland Information Guide:Image markup for recommendations on the best markup to use. For ideas and examples of how to place images, see Ireland Information Guide:Picture tutorial.
There are four different approaches to photo montages that different Ireland Information Guide users take. Different approaches may be suitable for different subjects, or it may be possible to set a standard. The options are:
No decision on photo montages has been made yet. Please discuss pros and cons of each option on the talk page.
Note that it is not recommended to use animated GIFs to display multiple photos. The method is not suitable for printing and also is not user friendly (users can not save individual images and have to wait before being able to view images while other images cycle round)
In general, if you have a good image that is in the wrong format, convert it to the correct format before uploading. However, if you find a map, flag, etc in JPEG format, only convert it to PNG if this reduces the file size without causing artifacts. For further advice on converting JPEG to PNG, see Ireland Information Guide:How to reduce colors for saving a JPEG as PNG.
Most of the maps on the CIA World Factbook website were coded as JPEG, but are now coded as GIF. To update these photos, download the GIF picture from the CIA factbook, recode it in PNG format, and upload it to Ireland Information Guide.
Try to avoid cropping or otherwise editing JPEGs too frequently--each edit creates more loss of quality. If you can find an original of a photograph in 16-bit or 24-bit PNG or TIFF, edit that, and save as JPEG before you upload.
Avoid images that mix photographic and iconic content. Though CSS makes it easy to use a PNG overlay on top of a JPEG image, the Ireland Information Guide software does not allow such a technique. Thus, both parts must be in the same file, and either the quality of one part will suffer, or the file size will be unnecessarily large.
When uploading SVG images, upload both the SVG source and a rasterised version, and cross-link on the image description page. Direct SVG support is planned (see meta:SVG image support) but not yet implemented.
See also: Ireland Information Guide:How to keep image file sizes as small as possible
The MediaWiki software that Ireland Information Guide uses, as of version 1.3, can resize images automatically. It is no longer necessary, in most cases, to resize images yourself. We want Ireland Information Guide content to be reused as widely as possible, including as a source for printed media. Therefore, you should generally upload photographic images at a high resolution and use the Ireland Information Guide image markup to resize it.
The only restriction is that uploaded files must be smaller than 2 megabytes. The software will warn "It is recommended that images not exceed 100KB in size" whenever you upload larger images, but with proper use of thumbnails, this warning may safely be ignored.
For line art, particularly that which you've drawn yourself, it may be better to manually resize the images to the right size and use them in the article. This is because the automatic resizing function can sometimes produce images that are larger in bytes than the original and/or of worse quality than the original.
In the future, Mediwiki image markup may be extended to better support "manual thumbnailing"; for now, if you want to upload a large version of a manually-scaled image do so and link to the larger version in the original's image description page.
In articles, if you wish to have a photo beside the text, you should generally use the "thumbnail" option available in the "Image markup", or approximately 200-250 pixels of width if you're doing it manually. Larger images should generally be a maximum of 550 pixels wide, so that they can comfortably be displayed on 800x600 monitors.
Articles may get ugly and difficult to read if there are too many images crammed onto a page with relatively little text. They may even overlap.
For this reason, it is often a good idea to temporarily remove the least-important image from an article and queue it up on the article's talk page. Once there is enough text to support the image, any contributor is free to shift the image back into the article.
If a contributor believes such a queued image to be essential to the article, despite the lack of text, he or she may decide to put it back in. However, he or she should not simply revert the article to its previous state, but make an attempt to re-size the images or create some sort of gallery section in order to deal with the original problem.
Old versions of articles do not show corresponding old versions of images, but the latest ones, unless the file names of the images have changed.
These software packages have been recommended by Ireland Information Guide users for use in image manipulation:
Information Guide.org&safe=off png (http://images.google.com/images?as_q=png&svnum=100&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&newwindow=1&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&imgsz=&as_filetype=&imgc=&as_sitesearch=Ireland) Information Guide.org jpg (http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&newwindow=1&safe=off&q=jpg+site%3AIreland) Information Guide.org gif (http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&newwindow=1&safe=off&q=gif+site%3AIreland)