We’ve wanted for a long, looong time to revamp the in-article image uploader - in fact, I think I’ve grumbled to a few of you about it repeatedly in the past, hah. It was an older system/menu, could be pretty confusing especially for newer users, and for several years has included features that were no longer relevant to wikiHow’s layout, which just added to the madness. Luckily, the time for that update is now!
Reuben and Scott have been working together to get a newer, more streamlined version out. This does a couple of main things: eliminates the defunct options from the menu for simplification, and focuses on a more user-friendly interface that keeps the options a little simpler. It also does away with the Flickr import, which was in itself outdated in terms of licensing, and over the years has lead many folks to include a lot of random images on articles that didn’t actually match their step-by-step process. Part of the goal here is to focus on easy image uploading for people who have made their own images to match the steps of their articles - which is the ideal, gold standard for helpfulness, really, over the addition of more random images.
To be clear, this isn’t
to say you can’t still import freely licensed images to wikiHow! You can still find images with compatible licenses on Flickr and Wikimedia, or sites like Pixabay, if you’d like to. You’d just use the Special:Upload
tool (our advanced image uploader), instead, to specify the license and attribution information. That’s totally doable, and that tool is linked directly from this Easy Image Uploader, should you ever need it. You can also still reuse images you’ve found on wikiHow
, just as before.
I’ll be working on some updates to the image uploading guides here - and welcome the help, if any of you want to chime in, too! And of course, let us know if you spot any bugginess when testing it out.
Overall, I hope this is a helpful streamlining, especially for newer folks. As a bonus, I’ve found this version of the tool is faster, too! Old pros who want to get fancy with licensing or image importing still have the full options at Special:Upload, as well
