In this guest post, Albin Larsson introduces the Mapillary 2 Commons tool that he has built for easy exporting of Mapillary images to Wikimedia Commons so they can be used in different projects and Wikipedia articles.

Wikimedia Commons is a repository of free media and data files such as images, sound, and tabular data. This tutorial introduces the Mapillary 2 Commons tool that allows anyone to easily export Mapillary images to Commons. This enables the images to be used to illustrate and enhance Wikipedia articles in any language version.

Prerequisites

The Mapillary 2 Commons tool requires that you have an Wikimedia account and are logged into Commons as well as that you have authorized the OAuth Uploader tool (which will handle the actual import of our image).

Exporting an image

First, find the image that you would like to export to Commons and copy its URL or image key. The easiest way to do this is by using the Mapillary share button in the lower right corner of the web app:

I chose an image by Mapillary contributor pbb of some public art in Prague for this demonstration.

Now you can head over to Mapillary 2 Commons and paste the image URL into the tools input element and click upload.

At this stage, the tool is checking if someone has already uploaded the image, as well as for a suitable title. It shouldn't take too long and once done, it should display the image and the proposed title.

In some remote areas (such as southwest of Null Island), Mapillary 2 Commons will fail to propose a title and the upload button will be disabled until you have defined one yourself.

If you are happy with the proposed title, you can now click the upload button. The upload button will redirect you an upload page that will automatically perform the upload and add licensing/author information to the file.

The image is now available for use across all Wikimedia projects and language instances. You can navigate to the file description page linked at the last page.

What now?

To make it easier for readers to discover the image, you should add some categories to it. See Commons:First_steps/Sorting.

To add an image to an Wikipedia article, see VisualEditor/User guide - Editing images and other media files.

If you are interested in the developer side of the tool, take a look at the Mapillary 2 Commons source code and API documentation on GitHub. For questions and comments, you can also reach me via Twitter.

/Albin