Tips on using images from Wikimedia Commons

Welcome to another Sourcing Series segment presented by the Data Literacy Program (DLP) of the Alexandria Archive Institute. In this how-to article, we discuss how we’ve used Wikimedia Commons as a source for cool and relevant images for our Digital Data Stories. This is a follow-up article to our introduction to online sources of reusable images.

Wikimedia Commons is one of our favorite places for images. There are tons of them, depicting various topics that include links to the original piece, author information, and the license associated with that specific image. They even provide some auto-generated ways to attribute images.

While those auto-generated attributions are nice, we usually examine the licenses ourselves to ensure we understand how we can use, share, and modify the media from that site. That way we know we’re using the image in the way its creator intended and practicing our data literacy skills. 

Our Digital Data Stories use a lot of images from Wikimedia Commons and you can see the credits section for Part Two of A Pun Goes Here as proof. Many of the images from Wikimedia Commons allow modification, so we’ve used them to create our own works that incorporate different colors, fonts, and other manipulations to help us illustrate our Digital Data Stories.

Besides looking great, finding images on Wikimedia Commons is an excellent data and visual literacy exercise. The images, besides including licenses such as those talked about in Introduction to Licenses, often have other useful metadata. These metadata—which are the data about the data or in this case data about the images—help us properly attribute those materials when we use them in other contexts.

Following the Creative Commons Wiki, we use the Title-Author-Source-License (TASL) attribution system. To populate those attributions, we use the information from the metadata for each image provided on the images page. If you’d like to learn more about how we use TASL, check out the Data Story Short How to use TASL attribution.

While each Wikimedia Commons page includes information for TASL attributions, after going through many pages we’ve noticed that it’s important to double check the title, author, source, and license. Specifically, it’s important to critically examine the author and license. That’s because although Wikimedia Commons checks images to ensure their licensing status through bots and other means, sometimes their designations are off.

For example, check out the image “The Tower of Babel Alexander Mikhalchyk.” While Wikimedia Commons lists it as licensed Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC BY-SA), the author of the image (listed in the Summary section of the image’s page)—Александр Михальчук or Aleksandr Mikhalchuk in the Latin Alphabet—is still alive. That means that unless he explicitly stated that his work is public domain, his copyright has not expired in the US. That’s because the copyright default in the US is the life of the creator plus 70 years with some variants.

Instead a user (listed in the File History portion of the page), who was not the author, uploaded this digital reproduction of the painting from a place to buy the original—physical—painting. That website also licenses the image for reuse on websites. However, none of the web licenses you can buy on that site suggest that someone can relicense it as CC BY-SA. Due to this, it’s probably better not to use or reuse this image. 

While not common, issues like this remind us that it’s important to explore an image’s metadata closely.  You don’t need to do a deep dive into every image’s provenance, source, file history, and author but critically reading its metadata you ensure that you’re accurately following the reuse and licensing stipulations identified by its creator or rights holder is important. That way you affirm their right to earn a living and/or receive credit for their work.

Sometimes giving that credit also means checking where Wikimedia Commons got the image from. The site uses various means to aggregate images from other sources, like Flickr, the New York Public Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This means, even though Wikimedia Commons has a copy, that image might come from another source with its own attribution requirements.

When that happens, it’s important to check the original provider of the image to ensure that the correct rights got passed to the Wikimedia Commons page. Then, you need to consider if you’d like to list that original source as the one for the image or Wikimedia Commons in your attribution. 

Now that you know a bit more about Wikimedia Commons, take the chance to browse the site to see if there are some fun media you can include in your next project or presentation. And don’t forget your attribution information and consider our recommendations about author and source. To learn more about other places to find new images or learn more about attribution take a look at the other entries in our Sourcing Series. Happy searching!

Image Credits: The main header image is an adaptation of an Adobe Stock image that we use as a logo for the Data Literacy Program (DLP) with the added title for the series and the specific title related to this article. As we used the screen captures of the “File:The Tower of Babel Alexander Mikhalchyk.jpg” page (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Tower_of_Babel_Alexander_Mikhalchyk.jpg) for educational purposes (from near the top of the page and near the bottom) it should be covered under fair use and the text is from a Wikimedia Commons page that states that “[a]ll structured data from the file namespace is available under the Creative Commons CC0 License; all unstructured text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License”. 

Article Updates: On 24 July 2025, the author added links to the Data Story Short mentioned in the piece (revising the wording in that link as needed) and to another sourcing series piece that discusses collection specific attribution requirements.