To upload a picture, please follow these instructions.

Why am I seeing foreign languages?

When a label, caption or description is not available in your language, the app falls back to another language. We consider it is better than showing nothing. For instance, a person whose phone is in Hindi might be happy to see English descriptions of items for which a Hindi description is not available.

Of course, you are more than welcome to contribute labels and descriptions in your language. To do so, please tap the Wikidata barcode icon in Nearby, or "View file page", or "View item page". This will open the website where translations can be contributed. Thanks a lot!

Geotagging (adding location data to pictures)

Pictures with geolocation data are much more valuable, so please:

1. Enable geotagging in your camera app (often labelled: GPS (tags) , Location (tags) , or save location and with an icon of a map pin marker)
2. To improve location accuracy, before taking pictures launch the free GPS Locker app.
3. You can use an app such as PhotoMap to check whether the pictures you take are correctly geolocalized or not.
4. You can manually add or edit the location of your photos using Geotag Photos Pro.

Need to be anonymous?

Pictures you upload may lead to your identity. Let's say you live under a dictatorship and take a picture revealing leaders corruption: you want to upload the picture to Commons but you probably do not want to be identified as the photographer or as the uploader. Below are a few steps you can take to reduce the risks of being identified, but remember that zero risk does not exist.

1. Use a VPN.
2. Remove the EXIF from your picture. Only a few persons on Earth use the same camera model, same firmware version, same settings as you, and all of this information is available in the EXIF, making it easy to link from this picture to your other pictures. The application Scrambled Exif (F-Droid , Google Play ) makes the process easy.
3. Create a throwaway Wikimedia account without an email address, and only use it for that picture or set of pictures. Then afterwards avoid modifying these pictures with your usual account.
4. Even lens/camera imperfections might theoretically allow a very motivated organization to match your pictures.

Editing your picture before upload

Most editors degrade picture quality, making pictures less accurate and bigger in file size. If you need to edit a picture before upload, please try to only use lossless JPEG editors:

• Rotate a picture losslessly: Use JPEG Cropper (or the gallery's built-in rotation tool if you have a Samsung phone).
• Crop a picture losslessly: Use JPEG Cropper. Alternatively, you can upload first and then crop with Croptool.
• Blur people's faces or car plates for privacy reasons, without degrading the quality of the rest of the picture: The only lossless Android app that offers this feature is AJT, not user-friendly but it does the job:
  1. Install AJT, open it.
  2. Tap Input, select your picture.
  3. Tap Switch then Transform then TransformType then select -pixelize.
  4. Tap Area Selector then select one area to blur (you have to drag the edges of the white-bordered rectangle, which are initially at the edges of the picture, you might have to zoom out first).
  5. Tap Execute, the modified picture should be in your gallery near the original, with an _ajt suffix.

Between taking a picture and uploading it, please do not apply color filters, flip horizontally/vertically, add stickers/text, nor apply any restoration/AI/upscaling. Such operations lose original data. If you really want to apply such transformations, please upload the original first, then upload the transformed picture as a new version using the desktop website.

Fixing errors in Nearby

Nearby is a fantastic way to find interesting places. But imagine that go to the place pinned on the map, and it is not at all what was expected? In such cases, fixing the problem is very important, and you can do it easily! It will benefit not only Commons but also all other Wikimedia projects and in particular Wikipedia. Here is how to proceed:

Obsolete items

Scenario: Yes there used to be a castle here, but now there is absolutely nothing left, maybe it is just green fields or a factory or recent houses. There is not even a plaque indicating that there used to be a castle.

How to fix it: With the place selected, tap the bottom bar that shows the place name. In the toolbar that appears, tap the Wikidata icon (which looks like a barcode). As the mobile Wikidata website does not allow statements edition, either open that page on a desktop web browser (via the "Share" button) or go to the three-dots menu and open the page in your web browser app, enable Desktop mode, and remove the "m." part from the URL. On the Wikidata item page, click on "Add statement", type "ended" and select the "dissolved, demolished or abolished date" property that appears. In the field that appears besides, enter the date at which the item disappeared, or if you don't know when that happened just set it to "unknown value" by clicking the small icon that looks like 3 stacked rectangles at the left of the field. Finally, press "publish".

Wrong coordinates

Scenario: The pin shows the "Bodleian Library" here, but actually you know this library it is at a different place, maybe 10 meters across the street or even a few kilometers away. Make sure your GPS is correct, and double-check locations.

How to fix it: With the place selected, tap the bottom bar that shows the place name. In the toolbar that appears, tap the Wikidata icon (which looks like a barcode). As the mobile Wikidata website does not allow statements edition, either open that page on a desktop web browser (via the "Share" button) or go to the three-dots menu and open the page in your web browser app, enable Desktop mode, and remove the "m." part from the URL. On the Wikidata item's page, find the "coordinate location" statement, click its "edit" button, and click on what looks like a grey point surrounded by two white triangles, at the left. It will popup the rank selector, select "Deprecated rank". Then click "add value" and enter the right location (most latitude/longitude formats are accepted), and click the "publish" button. Finally, go to the talk page and explain why you think this is the real location. Erroneous data often comes from external databases, deprecating rather than replacing gives these databases valuable feedback and prevents the erroneous data from being imported again into Wikidata.

Customizing the Nearby query

You can customize the Nearby query to show things that interest you, show labels in your preferred languages, etc. The Nearby query is written in SPARQL, which is very powerful but also hard to debug. We suggest you start from the default query and modify things little by little. The good news is that you can always go back to the default: just reset and apply. You can copy/paste various queries as text files or email drafts and paste the one you want to use when the need arises.

The names of the outputs can not be changed.

Variable names are replaced by the app before executing the query.

App versions

To know what version of the app you are using, open the "About" dialog and check the string immediately below the "Commons" title.

This string also tells you what channel you are using:

1. Stable if the version string contains one dot. Example: 3.0
2. Beta if the version string contains two dots. Example: 3.0.1
3. Alpha if the version string contains three dots. Example: 3.0.1.1019

If you want to switch back to a previous version, please download the source of the corresponding version and build the 'prod' flavor of the APK and install it (you may need to uninstall first).

Getting app logs from Android Studio

How to get app logs if you encounter an issue:

1. On your computer, download and install Android Studio.
2. On your phone, enable developer options and USB debugging.
3. Connect your phone to your computer with a USB cable.
4. View the logs.

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