Wikimedia Commons Now Home to More than 27 Million Media Files, All of Them Free to Reuse and Share

While Wikipedia gets a lot of attention we think it’s important not to forget that another (of many) Wikimedia Foundation projects, Wikimedia Commons, is doing superb work in providing access to imagery and other multimedia material that are freely available to share and reuse.
Wikimedia Commons is now home to more than 27 million media files. At the time we’re posting this item the total listed is of 27,159,271. On August 12, 2014, the total number of files available was 22,372,960 and five years ago (August 12, 2010) 7,150,247 were available.
In a new blog post, Wikimedia Commons volunteer, Ashley Van Haeften does a great job of pointing to a few of the larger and/or more interesting collections of imagery on Wikimedia Commons.
Van Haeften discusses:

• Los Angeles County Museum of Public Art
  25,000 high resolution photographs of museum artwork.

• LGBT Free Media Collective
  ” LGBT Free Media Collective was to encourage more uploads of LGBT-related free media of historic and cultural interest, as LGBT culture is under-represented on Wikimedia Commons; there are few archives of photographs with expired copyright that are relevant.”

• Wellcome Library
  100,000 high resolution images relating to medical history.

• Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA)
  “Over 10,000 photographs have been released on Wikimedia Commons.”
• Historic American Buildings Survey
  “300,000 photographs were uploaded, along with their map coordinates.”

Van Haeften concludes her blog post with links about the Wikimedia Commons API, how to upload material using the “bulk uploader,” and more.
Read the Complete Blog Post
Direct to Wikimedia Commons
See Also: Browse the Latest Items Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons
See Also: Review Wikimedia Commons Policy

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Libraries, News