WikiKnitting Blog

Pictures are an important part of any wiki article. This is especially true when you are explaining something or showing off your pattern. Today I will show you how to add images to your articles.

Upload Your Image

Before you can add an image to a wiki article you need to first upload it to the wiki. In order to help keep page load times fast, images should be smaller than 150 KB.

1. Login to your wiki user account. You can create an account for free if you don’t already have one. (See Part 1 for instructions)
2. Click the “Upload File” link in the toolbox on the left hand side of the wiki.
3. The source file name is the path on your computer to the file you wish to upload. You can use the Browse button to navigate and select the file.
4. Select a Destination Filename. The default name is the same name as the source file. However, you can change the filename if you wish. It is important to note that you should use a very descriptive filename such as “Mary’s Blue Baby Booties.jpg” and not a generic filename like “Picture1.jpg”
5. Select “Upload File”
6. After the file has been uploaded you will be taken its new page.
7. Edit this page and add information about the source of the image (such as a photo that you took), the author of the image, and any copyright information associated with the image.

A note on copyright: Know the copyright status of an image before you upload it if you didn’t take/create the image. I will remove images that violate their copyright license if asked to by the owner of the image.
You are now ready to add the image to a wiki article.

Linking to Your Images

A basic internal link is used to display the image. The basic syntax is

[[Image:{image name}|{options}]]

The most basic syntax will show a full size version of the image.

[[Image:Example.jpg]]

It’s a good idea to add alternate text to be shown for text only browsers. You can do this by using the pipe “|” symbol (found above \ on most keyboards) to separate the image name from the alternate text.

[[Image:Example.jpg|Yarn]]

Sometimes you might prefer to show a smaller version of the image. To do that you can use can use the thumb option and specify what size you want the image to be in pixels.

[[Image:Example.jpg|thumb|100px]]

If you add alternate text to a thumbnail it will be shown as a description underneath the image.

[[Image:Example.jpg|thumb|100px|Yarn]]

To adjust where on the page an image is aligned, add right, left, or center as an option to the image link. This works the same for both a full size image or a thumbnail.

[[Image:Example.jpg|center|Yarn]]

[[Image:Example.jpg|thumb|center|Yarn]]

The wiki has a built in gallery feature to easily organize multiple pictures. To create a gallery of thumbnail images, use the gallery tag. This will size all of the images the same and place them in a table automatically. However, using the gallery tag you can’t control the size of the thumbnails. A more flexible, but slightly more complicated option is to use a table to create a gallery. This will be covered in the next tutorial.

<gallery>
Image:Example.jpg|Item 1
Image:Example.jpg|[[Item 2]]
Image:Example.jpg|Item 3
Image:Example.jpg|Item 4
</gallery>

More information about adding images can be found at http://wikiknitting.com/wiki/Help:Images

Stay tuned for Part 4: How to use Tables

Quick Links
Part 1: Become a Contributor to WikiKnitting
Part 2: Wiki Editing Basics