Commons:Image pages

Each image has an image description page to give credit to authors and to store information about the file.

License and description

The main purpose of the image pages is to give an image description and a license and a source for the image. Images that lack license, author or source information risk being deleted. And images without description are not very useful. Therefore this is the most important information on a image page, so it is usually put on the top, before any other information.

It is preferred to use the Template:Information to display this information in the same way for all pages. For some images more specific information templates are used.

Maintenance templates

Image pages are also used to mark images that needs some kind of maintenance. This is done by adding different template tags.

The most importand maintenance task is deletion of images. When an image is marked for deletion users need to see that directly, so deletion templates are always put at the top of image pages.

Other kinds of maintenance is less important and should be placed after the image description and license information.

Awards

On Commons good images are choosen as Featured pictures, Quality images, Valued images or get other awards for their quality by the users. Information about image awards that is not very important but still informative. So these images are marked with different templates, like {{Assessments}}, {{QualityImage}}, {{VI}} and {{VIS}}. These templates can be put on the page after maintenance templates, in order of importance:

1. Picture of the Year
2. Picture of the day
3. Featured picture (here or in other projects)
4. Quality image and Valued images
5. Image used in a Valued image sets

Categories

Categories are used to make it easier for users to find images they are interested in. The categories are put at the bottom of the image page. See Commons:Categories for more information about categorising.

Interwiki links

In-line Interwiki links –those which are preceded by a colon ( : )– for terms used in the description of a file are encouraged. On the other hand, file description pages must not have Interwiki links of the kind that appear in the left sidebar as they would link to non-existing pages.

Example – good

… a composition by [[:w:en:Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska|Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska]] …

Example – bad

[[en:File:Georges Bizet - Rosabel Morrison - Carmen poster.png]]
[[fr:File:Georges Bizet - Rosabel Morrison - Carmen poster.png]]