Announcing the official Commons app for iOS and Android

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Login screen on the Commons app for Android.
Login screen on the Commons app for Android.

Love taking photos on your smartphone? Now you don’t need to wait to get home to upload your high quality educational photos to Wikimedia Commons, the free image repository used by Wikipedia and many other projects.
The official Wikimedia Commons app for iOS and Android allows you to quickly and easily upload your photos to Commons. You can also upload multiple files and add categories (Android only so far) and share your uploads through your favorite image sharing sites. Your contributions to Commons can help illustrate the world’s largest encyclopedia and make knowledge come to life for millions of readers around the globe.

The "my uploads" view on the Commons app for iOS.
The “my uploads” view on the Commons app for iOS.

In the future, we hope to add more features and make it easier to browse and discover all the great content Commons has to offer. We also look forward to being able to run more campaigns like Wiki Loves Monuments, encouraging expert Commons users and people new to Wikimedia projects alike to contribute to high-need content areas.
As always, we need your help and input to make these apps better. Take the apps for a test drive and let us know if you encounter bugs, or if you have great ideas for features we should add in the future.
And if you don’t have an iOS or Android device, don’t feel left out! Uploads to Commons for a wider selection of phones and browsers are supported on the mobile version of all Wikimedia projects.
Maryana Pinchuk, Associate Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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[…] Maryana Pinchuk said in a blog post, “Your contributions to Commons can help illustrate the world’s largest encyclopedia and […]

[…] “Love taking photos on your smartphone? Now you don’t need to wait to get home to upload your high quality educational photos to Wikimedia Commons, the free image repository used by Wikipedia and many other projects. The official Wikimedia Commons app for iOS and Android allows you to quickly and easily upload your photos to Commons. You can also upload multiple files and add categories (Android only so far) and share your uploads through your favorite image sharing sites. Your contributions to Commons can help illustrate the world’s largest encyclopedia and make knowledge come to life for millions of… Read more »

[…] [Fuente Wikimedia Foundation Blog] […]

[…] it is still rare to see apps release simultaneously for Android & iOS. Wikimedia has released an app for their open Commons community, which is a database of over 16 million freely usable […]

[…] proyecto Wikimedia Commons lanzó una aplicación para que los usuarios puedan agregar información gráfica desde los […]

[…] Source: Wikimedia Commons (iTunes), Wikimedia Commons (Google Play), Wikimedia Blog […]

[…] Source: Wikimedia Commons (iTunes), Wikimedia Commons (Google Play), Wikimedia Blog […]

[…] Source: Wikimedia Commons (iTunes), Wikimedia Commons (Google Play), Wikimedia Blog […]

[…] Source: Wikimedia Commons (iTunes), Wikimedia Commons (Google Play), Wikimedia Blog […]

[…] Source: Wikimedia Commons (iTunes), Wikimedia Commons (Google Play), Wikimedia Blog […]

[…] Source: Wikimedia Commons (iTunes), Wikimedia Commons (Google Play), Wikimedia Blog […]

[…] Source: Wikimedia Commons (iTunes), Wikimedia Commons (Google Play), Wikimedia Blog […]

[…] Source: Wikimedia Commons (iTunes), Wikimedia Commons (Google Play), Wikimedia Blog […]

[…] Source: Wikimedia Commons (iTunes), Wikimedia Commons (Google Play), Wikimedia Blog […]

[…] Source: Wikimedia Commons (iTunes), Wikimedia Commons (Google Play), Wikimedia Blog […]

[…] Source: Wikimedia Commons (iTunes), Wikimedia Commons (Google Play), Wikimedia Blog […]

[…] Source: Wikimedia Commons (iTunes), Wikimedia Commons (Google Play), Wikimedia Blog […]

[…] Source: Wikimedia Commons (iTunes), Wikimedia Commons (Google Play), Wikimedia Blog […]

[…] Source: Wikimedia Commons (iTunes), Wikimedia Commons (Google Play), Wikimedia Blog […]

[…] Source: Wikimedia Commons (iTunes), Wikimedia Commons (Google Play), Wikimedia Blog […]

[…] Source: Wikimedia Commons (iTunes), Wikimedia Commons (Google Play), Wikimedia Blog […]

[…] Source: Wikimedia Commons (iTunes), Wikimedia Commons (Google Play), Wikimedia Blog […]

[…] Source: Wikimedia Commons (iTunes), Wikimedia Commons (Google Play), Wikimedia Blog […]

I’d really like a way to select my license. CC-BY-SA 3.0 is not permissive enough, I’d prefer CC-BY 3.0.
Also, obviously, browsing of images and similar features.

[…] Source: Wikimedia Commons (iTunes), Wikimedia Commons (Google Play), Wikimedia Blog […]

[…] Maryana Pinchuk said in a blog post, “Your contributions to Commons can help illustrate the world’s largest encyclopedia and make […]

Thanks for your feedback Austin. Multiple license selection gets difficult really fast as demonstrated on the Upload Wizard. Perhaps we could add one or two but even that seems like a slippery slope that slows down the upload process for each image. Browsing of images and smilar features will certainly show up in future versions. Thanks for your feedback.

[…] Source: Wikimedia Commons (iTunes), Wikimedia Commons (Google Play), Wikimedia Blog […]

GPS data seems essential to get some sense into Wikimedia Commons. When I take a photo of a monument, the app should show me some very specific suggestions based on geo data.

Torsten, that’s a really good idea. I’d love if I took a photo of a monument and then was prompted with potential meta data from Geodata and/or Wikidata. Great suggestion.

[…] Wikimedia Foundation announced the release of its official Commons application for Android and iOS systems. The app allows users to take photos and quickly upload them to the […]

I agree with Austin and Torsten. GPS data might help evaluate uploaded photos and make better use of them. May be a competition for the best 10 photos per 100 square-miles could be started? I did not find any source code for the app. Is is available? I’d love to see a version for Windows Phone and might even be willing to contribute. Even thought they have little market-share, currently the Lumia 920 haS one of the best photo cameras on the market, and I would expect more devices with even better cameras. (Yes, I work for Nokia, but not… Read more »

Wikipedia Thanks a lot
And wales your doing a great job man very few people of your kind
hats off to you

You can currently enable GPS data in a crude way – in the ‘settings’ part of your camera, you can turn GPS on. The app / a bot on commons will appropriately tag your upload with the GPS co-ordinates.

[…] Bilder zum Multimedia-Repository Wikimedia Commons beizutragen ist oft noch komplexer. Mit einer neuen App für iOS und Android will die Wikimedia Foundation das Hochladen von Smartphone-Fotos […]

A nice feature that would also address the problem of too many low quality / inappropriate would be, if one could browse recent uploads of other users and “vote” them up. So only if an image gets many upvotes, it is considered to be worth a review. This would even out and spread the work of reviewing files, push it further into the community and it could be fun, too.
consider to be only able to upload an image after reviewing another image. or being presented some other recent images from the same category.

[…] Bilder zum Multimedia-Repository Wikimedia Commons beizutragen ist oft noch komplexer. Mit einer neuen App für iOS und Android will die Wikimedia Foundation das Hochladen von Smartphone-Fotos […]

[…] it is still rare to see apps release simultaneously for Android & iOS. Wikimedia has released an app for their open Commons community, which is a database of over 16 million freely usable […]

The two categories tracking those uploads are empty (the two daugthers of [[Category:Commons app]]).
Is it that no one yet has uploaded any pictures with the apps ; or that there is an issue with the tracking system?

Hi! First of all congrats for the App. It’s a great step forward. Regarding the license…for next updates maybe you could implement a “license by default” options on the Apps preferences, so a user can “pre-configure” the license of choice.

why is this only available for iOS 6? Some of us cant upgrade to the newest version.. that seems a bit elitist 🙁

[…] Wikimedia Foundation announced the release of its official Commons application for Android and iOS systems. The app allows users to take photos and quickly upload them to the […]

That’s great but isn’t there any such application for Blackberry users? 🙁

Hi,
Thanks for doing this.
I’d really like to have to set the license, some categories for all uploads and a default description. As I do with http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Commonist.
For instance on commonist at, I have cats for
Source set as “{{own}}”
Author set as “[[User:Irate|John Bradley]]”
Cats set as “JohnBradley images|May 2013 in Liverpool|Taken with Olympus FE-48 / X-44|Liverpool Central Library”
You should also be able to pull out the location and fill in the date field.
Commonist also adds images to my watch list and updates a “gallery”

Great work to the Wikimedia team for getting this app out. I’d love to see the ability to add Geo coordinates as well, but the method Yuvi Panda mentions does work on most phones.
I second Thorsten’s request for a Windows Phone app, urgently! Most organisations are now turning the tide and releasing apps for all three OSes at the same time: iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

Cool, one of the apps that really work on 7-inch tabs. It’s amazing how easy it became to improve the knowledge of the whole human race 🙂

[…] Announcing the official Commons app for iOS and Android — Wikimedia blog […]

wow..its nice..like it..

Blackberry here

[…] Announcing the official Commons app for iOS and Android – "Love taking photos on your smartphone? Now you don’t need to wait to get home to upload your high quality educational photos to Wikimedia Commons, the free image repository used by Wikipedia and many other projects." […]