Commons Quality Images, 20 years of celebrating Wikimedians taking those photographs we need

Commons Quality Images (COM:QI) was created during June 2006. The purpose of COM:QI was to identify high quality photographs taken by Wikimedians and made freely available to the community at large through Commons. As of 14 June 2026 over 450,000 media files, mostly photographs, have been recognised through this process. Alongside photographs, QI has Microscopic images, animated GIF’s, and graphical works including our own QI seal (pictured).

From the Beginning

In September 2005 Commons became live, just 6 months later I was encouraged over by User:Pfctdayelise who had been there from the first month. In June 2006 User:Pfctdayelise was searching to put together collections of images created by Commons users as rotating background images, or calendars to help promote the project. I tried to help, we could not even find a common subject matter consisting of reasonably sized and quality printable images. Wikimedia Commons had some great photos, some of which had been featured, but a substantial portion were images scraped from other sites like NASA and Flickr.

That started me thinking about how we raise the profile of community uploaded images and encourage efforts to improve them. Having already contributed to some Good Articles over on en.Wikipedia I thought we could create a similar project but for photographs.

Creating the project I saw some key necessities: it needed to be efficient with clear standards, while not taking weeks to decide the outcome. Most importantly it needed to focus only on images that had been taken by members of the Commons Community and that once recognised it could not be taken away. From there working with User:Wikimol and others we built the project. We also created image guidelines which would enable consistent reviewing of nominations.

The image guidelines started out as;

1. Photographic images
   1. Low resolution / thumbnail. Photographic QP has to have at least 1.92 megapixels (=1600×1200, for example)
   2. JPEG problems. Too much compressed, too low JPEG quality settings in camera / when saving. Visible jpeg artifacts. => Use better quality settings (e.g. set JPEG “superfine”, shoot RAW, save in photoshop with max. quality)
   3. Noise problems, too much noise. Be it chroma noise, luminance noise, visible grain, scratches in scans… QP should not have distracting amount of noise when viewed in 100%
   4. Bad exposure. Overexposure, blown out highlights, underexposure, shadows details replaced by jpeg maps… In incorrectly exposed images, significant details in a significant part are lost.
   5. Color problems. Bad white balance. Distracting (typically purple) hazing at 100%. Color aberration. QP must have reasonable colors (which does not necessarily mean natural colors).
   6. Improper or undefined focus, insufficient depth of field. QP should have clearly defined focus, e.g. main subject in focus, foreground and background out of focus. Or the whole scene in focus. Counterexample – main subject blurry, foreground even more blurry, focus is somewhere between main subject and background. DOF could be low on purpose.
   7. Blur. Images blurred just because of shaking hand or subject moving too fast. Motion blur in QP has to have purpose.
   8. Poor lighting. Including: distracting reflections (usual problem with built-in flash), unintended vignetting, distracting harsh shadows. Generally bad lighting makes scenes with space look flat.
   9. Overfiltered. There are so many PS/Gimp filters. Rarely a better image is created just by applying more and more filters…
   10. Bad or nonexistent composition, unclear or nonexistent subject. QP should have subject and composition of the image should support depiction of that subject, not distract from it.
   11. Bad perspective, tilt, and other distortions. An eye (or, more precisely, a brain) is a sensitive detector capable of spotting even a small tilt … falling trees, churches, inclined water surfaces,… Images of architecture should usually be rectilinear and without too much perspective distortion.
2. Stitched images, panoramas.
   1. Panoramatic QP has to have a height of 800px min.
   2. Stitching problems. Stitched images should be without artifacts, colors and lightness should be the same across the image.

All of these may look familiar to many of you as they are still present as Commons:Image guidelines, the very same guidelines that every WikiLoves or similar competition uses as their rules. 

Now we had a process with guides, we approached User:LadyofHats who was known for the drawings she was uploading at that time. LOH was asked to create a seal which we could use to help identify successful photos, that seal is the one we continue to use. Some time during this the QI seal itself got recognised as a Quality Image.

In those early months every image was reviewed and the pages manually updated, a time consuming process that would occasionally be interspersed with edit conflicts. The community embraced QI and a new project called Valued Image emerged for recognising sets of image rather than individual images. It was the efforts of User:Dschwen, who had also taken on maintenance tasks, decided to create a bot that would do most of the work for us. Mike Peel continues to maintain the QICbot and has been invaluable at keeping it working, as of 16 June 2026 QICbot has performed 922,000 edits looking after QI tasks.

QI grew fast once the QICbot came on board. I stepped into the background watching the community grow QI. Over time many contributors have made QI. Like User:Poco a poco who presented at Wikimania in London on how QI helped him improve his contributions. For the curious there is an opt-in unaudited list of QI by photographers. Whether it’s one successful image or 20,000 of them they all make QI what it is. 

The future

I think some of QI’s potential still hasn’t been realised. I saw it as a historical record of the growth of photography, of something researchers could look back over and see how it has matured. Perhaps more could be done to integrate QI images in content on other projects as they are recognised as our better works. Maybe a bot could triage nominations to identify the more regular issues that cause images to be rejected, though the human touch should always remain the final judge. 

In the future, QICbot will reach 1 million edits, QI will reach 500,000 very soon. QI carries within itself a lot of untapped potential. 

Could it be time to consider creating a sister project for Quality Videos? I know one thing: there will always be enough high quality images created by Wikimedians to make a calendar for any subject. The challenge will be in choosing just 12.

I would must take a moment to acknowledge everyone who has already helped Commons Quality Images along it’s 20 year journey there has been so many as well as everyone who joins the efforts in future. It’ll always be nice to reflect and be able to say I was able to open the door to something so special. The future of Quality Images is now a journey the Wikimedia Commons Community will decide. 

QI’s prosperity comes from the collective effort of everyone! Perhaps this will encourage you to join the QI club.