Images

Images uploaded should be print screens from the current IMSMA version. Upload high resolution print screens.

General rules

• Use the image description page to describe an image and possibly its copyright status.
• Use a clear, detailed title. Note that if any image with the same title has already been uploaded, it will be replaced with your new one.
• Upload a high-resolution version of your image whenever possible, and use the automatic thumbnailing option of the MediaWiki image markup to scale down the image. MediaWiki accepts images up to 100 MB in size. Do not scale down the image yourself, as scaled-down images may be of limited use in the future.
• Crop the image to highlight the relevant subject.
• If you create an image that contains text, please also upload a version without any text. It will be useful in the future to translate the image into other languages.
• Try not to use color alone to convey information, as it is inaccessible in many situations.
• Use JPEG format for photographic images and TV or movie screenshots; SVG format for icons, logos, drawings, maps, flags, and such; PNG format for software screenshots and when only a raster image is available; GIF format for inline animations; and Ogg/Theora for video.
• In general, there is no need to specify thumbnail size. Users can select their ideal size in preferences.

Copyright and licensing

Before you upload an image, make sure that the image falls in one of the three categories:

1. Own work: You own all rights to the image, usually meaning that you created it entirely yourself.
2. Freely licensed: You can prove that the copyright holder has released the image under an acceptable free license. Note that images that are licensed for use only on the GICHD IMSMA wiki, or only for non-commercial or educational use, or under a license that doesn't allow for the creation of modified/derived works, are unsuitable.
3. Public domain: You can prove that the image is in the public domain, i.e. free of all copyrights.

Image titles and file names

Descriptive file names are useful. Check whether there are already similar images in IMSMA Wiki. Then decide whether your image should replace one (in each page 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, "Test.PNG" is considered different from "Test.png". For uniformity, lower case file name extensions are recommended.

Placement

• Image galleries: Images are typically interspersed individually throughout a page near the relevant text. However, the use of a gallery may be appropriate in some pages if a collection of images can illustrate aspects of a subject that cannot be easily or adequately described by text or individual images. Images in a gallery should be suitably captioned to explain their relevance both to the article subject and to the theme of the gallery, and the gallery should be appropriately titled (unless the theme of the gallery is clear from the context of the article). Note that galleries will be small if the wiki is printed. See the Wikipedia help file for galleries.

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  Example image gallery from the IMSMA Core Design Concepts

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• Image queuing: Articles may get ugly and difficult to read if there are too many images onto a page with relatively little text. They may even overlap. Avoid adding images after each other. Use a gallery, if this is required.

Format

• Drawings, icons, maps, flags: are preferably uploaded in SVG format as vector images. Images with large, simple, and continuous blocks of colour which are not available as SVG should be in PNG format.
• Software screenshots: should be in PNG format.
• Photos and scanned images: should be in JPEG format.
• Inline animations: should be in animated GIF format.
• Video: should be in Ogg/Theora format.

Size

• Uploaded image size: Uploaded files must be smaller than 100 megabytes. The MediaWiki software can resize images automatically, so it is rarely necessary to resize images yourself.
• Displayed image size: Images beside the text should generally use a caption and the "thumb" (thumbnail) option; the default results in a display 220 pixels wide, except for those logged-in users who have set a different default in their user preferences. Where size forcing is appropriate, larger images should generally be a maximum of 500 pixels tall and 400 pixels wide, so that they can comfortably be displayed on the smallest displays in common use. Since MediaWiki dynamically scales inline images there is no need to reduce file size via scaling or quality reduction when uploading images, although compressing PNGs may be useful. Lead images should usually be no wider than "upright=1.35" or "300px".