How do you look for images online? Do you simply head to a search engine? It is likely that an image from Wikimedia Commons will be one of the first search results. Last month, during our Indian Heritage Online campaign, we added 1728 postcards, prints and photographs of India to Wikimedia Commons! We can’t wait for you to use these!
These images were from the collection of The J.Paul Getty Museum, PaperJewels (an archive of postcards), TuckDB & University of Edinburgh and had already been published with an open license. Even then, it had been a challenge to discover the images.
Images from Wikimedia Commons are used by everyone – school projects, academic research papers, social media or news media – an image from WikiCommons can be spotted anywhere.
To make ‘Indian Heritage’ visible online, we felt it was incredibly important to add collections to Wikimedia Commons!
Even as this challenge was focused on uploading images of places and monuments, we soon realised that our enthusiastic participants uploaded more images than what we had originally intended! So we opened the challenge up further, enabling an upload of images featuring people as well. Take a look here and scroll down to see a gallery of our favourites!
Indian Heritage Online: What Next?
Uploading images was just the first step – we continue to work on Wikidata to link these images to others. We welcome you to translate descriptions of these images in a language of your choice, so more people can understand / use them.
Lastly, we will celebrate with a few illustrated talks on Indian heritage and architecture. Stay tuned for these – don’t forget to subscribe for our newsletter to be updated!
Here’s a look at some of our favourite images from the repository.
a selection by Campaign Coordinator, Arunesh Varade
Click on an image to open the gallery! Do you recognise any of these places?
Cityscapes, Streets and Bazaars
Colonial Infrastructure: Hospitals, Libraries, Hotels, Post Offices
Sacred Spaces : Temples, Mosques and Churches
Hill stations : Shimla, Mussoorie, Nainital, Darjeeling and Srinagar
