Wikipedia talk:Image recreation requests

Free, crappy images?
Why only for replacing non-free images? Why not for replacing free but crappy images? Fredrik | talk 03:58, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * Sounds good to me. - Omegatron


 * See Category:Images for cleanup. dbenbenn | talk 07:38, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

individuals section
instead of this, the list of graphics artists page could simply have a column to check if you take requests, and a column if you are willing to reproduce already existing pictures. - Omegatron 04:15, Jan 30, 2005 (UTC)

Page source code
Is it just my imagination, or is it really difficult to read the source-code of this page? Does anyone know some wiki-fu involving shorter lines and whitespace? Ojw 23:13, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure what you mean. I'm pretty handy at wiki-fu. What are you thinking of doing? – Quadell (talk) (sleuth) 17:03, Feb 3, 2005 (UTC)


 * The new headings are good. Most of the "list items" ran to several lines of wiki-source, without any space between items, and since each item is only marked by a : at the beginning (and with :'s everywhere in the image links), it can be quite hard to see which item is which


 * I assume we can just put blank-lines between list items or something, and it won't break the "displayed" page Ojw 19:25, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Map of Celtic influence
Any of you map people might want to try to help fix up Image:Distribution of Celts in Europe.png.

Commons?
It seems like most of the images created by this project don't end up at the Commons. Why not? dbenbenn | talk 21:26, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * You're right – they probably should go to the commons. However, I've never put an image there.  Where are instructions on how to upload there and use here?  -- Kbh3rd 21:29, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * It couldn't be easier. Just go to The Commons, and . . . well, you'll have to create an account to upload images. Then click the "upload file" link, and it works the same as the upload file system does here. (It has a different look, but it works the same.) Then, linking to Commons images from Wikipedia happens automatically. For instance, the picture on the right was uploaded by me to the Commons, not here. No sweat. – Quadell (talk) (sleuth) 22:01, Feb 4, 2005 (UTC)
 * If we do that should we put in a IFD request for the image on the wikipedia? --MaxPower 13:55, 2005 Feb 6 (UTC)
 * A question: do you lose the (textual) content of the image page when an image is deleted? Lupin 14:17, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Max: yes. Lupin: yes. – Quadell (talk) (sleuth) 18:30, Feb 6, 2005 (UTC)
 * Can the edit history of the image page be moved with the image to the commons? Otherwise I seem to remember reading somewhere that we'd have to scrap/recreate from scratch the page content (as it's GFDLed) which would be a shame. Lupin 19:09, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * There's no way (yet?) to push the history to the Commons. If the description page only has a few edits, you can recreate each of them in sequence, with an edit summary like "First edit of Image:foo by User:bar on date xx/yy/zzzz", "Second edit", etc.  I think that would satisfy the attribution requirement.  Do you have a specific image in mind?  dbenbenn | talk 02:08, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Move this page to the commons?
I wonder if this page and all other languages should just be redirected to a commons version? I just found this page on french wikipedia fr:Utilisateur:Cdang/gallerie that has all kinds of useful images, including some that I saw requested here, but I bet no one on the english wikipedia ever notices them. - Omegatron 18:12, Mar 5, 2005 (UTC)

Nominating finished requests for IFD?
Does it make sense to nominate images that we've replaced here for IFD? I mean, the unverified image backlog is so high, might help to say, "hey, we don't need this anymore". – flamuraiTM 19:46, Feb 7, 2005 (UTC)


 * Yes! I've been going through and nominating them myself when I get the time, but I'd be thankful for any help in this. – Quadell (talk) (sleuth) 21:45, Feb 7, 2005 (UTC)


 * I thought we were specifically not supposed to do that for these! I've added it to the "here's how to help" section.  dbenbenn | talk 02:01, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * Hm, yeah, I'm just learning about the controversy. I guess hold off for now. (Perhaps you could tag the old image as, so we could find it easily when a move is more appropriate?) – Quadell (talk) (sleuth) 13:50, Feb 8, 2005 (UTC)

How to edit certain images
I was looking at Image:Tectonic plates.png, and I was thinking about making a dozen or so versions of this image: one for each tectonic plate. I had wanted to color in all plates a neutral blue for ocean and a light gray for land, so that I could highlight a single plate. So I tried in MS-Paint, and it's just not that easy. First off, many of the plates are not one solid pixel color. They'll have alternating pixels slightly different colors, so that it looks like a composite color. Secondly, the anti-aliasing of the boundaries takes into account the color of the plate on either side. Zoom in and you'll see what I mean. What's a good tool to use for this sort of thing? – Quadell (talk) (sleuth) 13:02, Feb 17, 2005 (UTC)


 * Using GIMP for example (runs fine on Windows),but presumably it's similar if you're using the non-free program
 * Use one of the brush tools to paint-out the text. Ctrl-click to "pick-up" a local background colour and paint with it, Ctrl-z to undo
 * Clear-up the areas you want by magic-selecting (the wand tool) an area, and adjust the "fuzziness of matching colours" (by double-clicking on the tool) until it reliably selects the area you want. Use selection grow/shrink from the edit menu to move the selection closer or further from borders.
 * Once an area is selected, a good way to fill it with colour is to create a new transparent layer, select that layer, and use the fill tool. That also means you can remove the block of colour easily by hiding or removing the new layer (non-destructive editing)
 * Alternatively, double-click on the selected brush to edit it, create a new, huge brush, and use it to paint-out the selected area in a colour.
 * To edit borders, try selecting everything that isn't a border, then inverting the selection (Ctrl-I) so that borders are now selected. Either press ctrl-K to remove them (to transparent, or to background colour depending on mode), or create a new layer and fill-them in white or black.
 * Holding down Shift with a select tool adds to the selection, and Ctrl removes things from the selection. So Shift+(click, click, click) might select 3 continents
 * If you keep a copy of the original image as its own layer, you can turn that on and off or make it semitransparent while you're editing other layers, so that you can see more easily what you're working on
 * With that image you'll have to decide whether you're outlining plates or landmasses of course. It's a plate-carré map projection, so you can always superimpose another map with the country-outlines. Wikipedia blank-map standard seems to be #CDC3CC for land, with white for non-land and 2-3px white borders, which are pretty easy to colour-in using a paint tool.
 * Don't forget to change that image to Image, Mode, RGB to get colour-dependant tools to work properly, otherwise you'll be using only the palete that was available in the original image
 * "Select By colour" then click on a border, and "Grow selection" will give a good mask containing only the boundaries.
 * HTH, etc. Ojw 13:31, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * When I see a mess like that, my first urge is to find another source! In http://www2.nature.nps.gov/geology/usgsnps/pltec/platesSH.pdf is a nice clean grayscale version of the same USGS map, still in its original vector form. I don't know how far you've already got into the project, but if you can hang a little while I'll have an outline version uploaded to commons. --iMeowbot~Mw 15:47, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Okay, Image:World tectonic plate map large.png is 256K, 1024x700 and should be nice and easy to color and scale as needed. Now I've got to find categories for it :P --iMeowbot~Mw 16:10, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Thanks to you both! – Quadell (talk) (sleuth) 16:34, Feb 17, 2005 (UTC)


 * Oooo shiny! Somebody got hold of the original Illo file and redid the color version. It's the picture of the day on Commons today, Image:Tectonic plates.png


 * (Image:Tectonic_plates_projection_demo.jpg (ok, I haven't actually checked that it's plate-carr&eacute; yet...!) Ojw 14:43, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC))

Standards?
Does we have a standard size for recreating images? I've been doing somewhere between 400px-600px as the largest dimension. Then I saw some of bdesham's images and iMeowbot's and they are much larger. I guess images in the commons are for "whatever" purpose, so large images are good? It might be nice to standardize this...? Or maybe set up some general standards? --MaxPower 16:24, 2005 Feb 17 (UTC)


 * Good point. On the Commons, I usually aim for at least 1000px in the short dimension, if at all possible. But then again, I'm working mostly with photographs, and often 1000px means scaling down by a factor of 2 to 4. --MarkSweep 00:50, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * Giant images are fine, Commons encourages that. It makes sense to me, because Wikimedia has nice thumbnailing/scaling capabilities built in, bandwidth is generally increasing, display resolutions are gradually getting higher, and bitmapped images don't scale up as well as they scale down.
 * One thing that I'm not happy about with Wikipedia is the compression used for scaling JPEG images. It's a little too lossy of a setting, and JPEG thumbnails can look far worse than their full-size versions. PNG and GIF get kinder treatment. --iMeowbot~Mw 15:57, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * I wondered about that too. I'm not sure it's purely a question of the quality setting, though. I find that I have to sharpen images slightly after scaling them down. However, doing automatic sharpening of thumbnails is probably too tricky, since what may work well for some images could look awful for others. --MarkSweep 23:45, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Oh yeah, that can be a problem too, but with JPEG thumbnails there's this really nasty artifact thing going on. One example that really annoys me is Image:Ergosphere.jpg.     On the red ball over the "event horizon" caption there is a nasty curdled milk effect on the thumbnail, but the full image is free of that. Testing locally before uploading didn't show that artifacting :(
 * I'll probably break down and download the Wikimedia software just to peek at what it's using to generate those thumbs, because right now the only way to find out what the results will be is to commit to an upload. --iMeowbot~Mw 05:12, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * It uses ImageMagick for creating thumbnails. As for Image:Ergosphere.jpg, it may be better to use PNG for images like this (with large regions of uniform color and high-contrast edges).  If you need to use JPEG, you can make it look better by tweaking the DCT parameters, but I don't know if the JPEG settings are preserved by ImageMagick. --MarkSweep 06:20, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Time for a reorg already?
Image recreation requests is becoming a dumping ground for Requested pictures overflow (note the slew of map requests that refer to outside links). If that keeps up, it is going to turn from a quick-fix project into an relatively obscure mirror of WP:RP. Which makes more sense: weed out the general image requests and send them to WP:RP where they belong, or merge this project as a whole into WP:RP? --iMb~Mw 21:02, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * I say we keep them separate, and move requests to there. – Quadell (talk) (sleuth) 22:03, Mar 5, 2005 (UTC)

Irr template
I made a new template. If anyone adds an image recreation request here, you can add to the image description page. That adds the following to the page:  This image is unverified or is not available under a free license. It has therefore been listed on Image recreation requests, and it is hoped that a recreation of the image can be released under a free license. I hope this is helpful. – Quadell (talk) (sleuth) 14:07, Mar 10, 2005 (UTC)