Nichalp's Upload Script is a script written in Perl that helps you upload your photographs en masse to commons. Instead of manually adding a description, the date, categories, licence information, and geo-templates to each image, you can write it just once, and the script will format it as wiki-syntax for the entire series of images you want to upload. This is particularly useful if you have to fill in similar information for a series of images. But that's not all! You can do so much more.
The script can be used on Microsoft Windows and GNU/Linux. It has not been tested on Mac. If you have a fast internet connection, or plan to upload smaller files, consider getting a bot account to prevent the script from flooding the recent changes list.
The first script is used to scan all JPEG images in the directory, and store the information such as date, camera information and so on into a CSV (comma separated value) file. The image names and column headings are automatically added.
Using any Spreadsheet software, fill up the various fields such as description, new name, category and so on.
Run the second script to read the CSV file data, and upload the corresponding file to commons.
Copy the images you want to upload into the above folder.
Note:- Images must contain the only following file extensions (.JPG, .jpg, .jpeg, .JPEG) to be picked up by the script. (PNG and other filetype support to come later)
Caution:- Make sure you have backups of all images to be uploaded
In the command line (Terminal in Linux/DOS in Windows), navigate to the above folder.
Run csv_creator.pl from the command line by typing: perl csv_creator.pl
A CSV (comma separated value) file, upload.csv is created in the folder. The CSV file includes the header line, the list of image file names in the folder, and the corresponding image Exif information.
Add the necessary information you want to the CSV file. To know how to format data in the CSV file, please read CSV fields explained. You can edit the data in your favourite spreadsheet software such as LibreOffice Calc or Microsoft Office Excel.
Save the CSV file.
Run upload.pl from the command line by typing: perl upload.pl
To specify your CSV file location, use perl upload.pl file.csv
To hide your password while typing it, use perl upload.pl - secure
To tell Perl to not load huge images/files into memory, but read them directly from disk while uploading, use perl upload.pl - - disk
If your CSV file does contain any UTF-8 (non-ASCII) characters, use perl upload.pl - - - utf8
You are then asked to enter your username and password.
The script then uploads the image along with the associated metadata. Errors if any, are logged in debug.txt.
A gallery.txt file is created in the same folder. This file contains the list of images marked up with the gallery wiki syntax. If you need, you can use the text to create image galleries.
May hang if the computer is unattended for a long time. Solution: Check the last file uploaded. Quit the program, open the CSV file, delete all entries up to the last uploaded file. And restart the process.
HTML formatting may appear in the command prompt. Reason unclear. Possible solution: Avoid editing in commons when uploading.
Note:- Images must contain the only following file extensions (.JPG, .jpg, .jpeg, .JPEG) to be picked up by the script. (PNG and other filetype support to come later)
Caution:- Make sure you have backups of all images to be uploaded
