I'm trying to upload a batch of ~35 photos to commons. These were taken earlier this month in Nagasaki, including some photos at the Atomic Bomb Museum which normally does not allow photography. I asked permission to take photographs, which I would be uploading for use in Wikipedia and other projects (under GFDL/CC). While my Wikimania badge really isn't official, I had it with me to help show them that my request was legitimate. Without my badge, I highly doubt I would go ask for permission. I know the topic of getting people credentials has been mentioned before.
I'm now having trouble uploading the batch of images. I have another batch (~100 photos) from Hiroshima, including the museum there (they allow photography). In the past, I have used commonist. I was halfway uploading the batch with the tool, and my wireless broadband internet connection went out briefly. I would have to start over with commonist and hope my internet connection does not get dropped while uploading. I then looked for other options and saw Wikimedia commonplace. Downloaded it, spent time adding descriptions and information, using "bulk edit". Hit upload, entered my user name and password, then submit. Commonplace then froze for a minute or so. Then, I got "unhandled exception" error (see below) and forced to quit. I tried these steps again, including with a small batch of just two images, with no luck. I submitted this to the Google bugs/issues page, but am a bit frustrated at the moment. As an experienced user, if I'm having this much trouble, I can only imagine a new user would just give up. Have others experienced problems with the upload tools?
I have Flickr Uploader which works flawlessly, and allowed me to keep up with my pictures while I was traveling, uploading them within hours or a day of taking them. The commonplace interface looks cool and thought it would work like Flickr Uploader. Many of my pictures are on Flickr, but not at as high resolution, so FlickrLickr or Flickr upload bot won't work unless I re-upload to flickr. Now, I guess I will have to upload them one at a time to commons? what other options might I have besides uploading them individually? I could upload them to my own server. Could a bot then transfer them to Commons? Though, I like (with Flickr Uploader) to batch edit the descriptions and licensing information. Any other possibilities for batch uploads?
-Aude
On 8/26/07, Aude audevivere@gmail.com wrote:
I'm trying to upload a batch of ~35 photos to commons.
[snip]
Hi Aude,
Checkout Commonist, http://djini.de/software/commonist/
You can also use the pywikipedia bot framework to make custom uploaders. It's not a good recommendation for people who aren't comfortable with programming and probably doesn't make sense for 35 images, but in cases where you want to upload more and need to do some smart things with the description text it can be useful.
I tried Commonist. It crashed halfway through with half the files supposedly transferred, when my internet connection dropped briefly. None of my files ended up on commons, because apparently all the images in the batch need to upload and the tool does some final step to complete the upload. Though, commonist has worked in the past for me. Well, as I'm typing this, I found that a few photos from earlier today seem to have uploaded, probably with Commonist. I'm trying it again, hopefully my internet connection won't drop. At least Commonist saved descriptions and other information previously entered.
As for pywikipedia,I don't mind programming a little bit, but don't imagine it's a good use of my time when other tools exist. I don't need a custom tool, but a standard one that everyone can use, including newbies would be best.
-Aude
On 8/26/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/26/07, Aude audevivere@gmail.com wrote:
I'm trying to upload a batch of ~35 photos to commons.
[snip]
Hi Aude,
Checkout Commonist, http://djini.de/software/commonist/
You can also use the pywikipedia bot framework to make custom uploaders. It's not a good recommendation for people who aren't comfortable with programming and probably doesn't make sense for 35 images, but in cases where you want to upload more and need to do some smart things with the description text it can be useful.
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
On 8/26/07, Aude audevivere@gmail.com wrote:
I tried Commonist. It crashed halfway through with half the files supposedly transferred, when my internet connection dropped briefly. None
Feh. Improving that tool (or providing something like it) should be on our priority list.
As for pywikipedia,I don't mind programming a little bit, but don't imagine it's a good use of my time when other tools exist. I don't need a custom tool, but a standard one that everyone can use, including newbies would be best.
I didn't think you would, which is why I mentioned it to you. There is script in pywikipedia called upload.py. It will take a file an a description on its commandline and upload it. When I mass upload I usually write a little script to wrap it. Hardest part is getting pywikipedia configured against commons. :(
Not a general solution perhaps, but for you it would do what you want most likely.
I think I will be trying pywikipedia. It's not just this batch of ~35, but 100+ more that I also have from Hiroshima, maybe some more from Taiwan, and additional batches that I may have in the future. Overnight, I let Commonist run. It seems to have transferred everything, but failed on the last step -- creating galleries or something.
-Aude
On 8/26/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/26/07, Aude audevivere@gmail.com wrote:
I tried Commonist. It crashed halfway through with half the files supposedly transferred, when my internet connection dropped
briefly. None
Feh. Improving that tool (or providing something like it) should be on our priority list.
As for pywikipedia,I don't mind programming a little bit, but don't
imagine
it's a good use of my time when other tools exist. I don't need a
custom
tool, but a standard one that everyone can use, including newbies would
be
best.
I didn't think you would, which is why I mentioned it to you. There is script in pywikipedia called upload.py. It will take a file an a description on its commandline and upload it. When I mass upload I usually write a little script to wrap it. Hardest part is getting pywikipedia configured against commons. :(
Not a general solution perhaps, but for you it would do what you want most likely.
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 8/26/07, Aude audevivere@gmail.com wrote:
I tried Commonist. It crashed halfway through with half the files supposedly transferred, when my internet connection dropped briefly. None
Feh. Improving that tool (or providing something like it) should be on our priority list.
What features should the ultimete-upload-tool have?
The tool should be stable. It should save my upload session, should my internet connection drop or computer crash or even let me pause the uploading. My upload speed at home is not that fast, so it always takes a while and
Also, with commonist, I know some or all of my files transferred but I don't see them anywhere on commons. Except three images somehow showed up. When I tried again overnight, it managed to transfer everything, but the tool needed to create gallery pages for me before the upload finalized. If it fails in this last step, my file transfer apparently is canceled and files lost. I really don't care about having a gallery of my images, but simply please let my images be transferred.
With Commonplace, I couldn't even start the upload. It froze when I clicked "upload" after entering my username and password. I have no clue why, but the interface on the tool seemed nice. Would be good to get that tool working well.
-Aude
On 8/27/07, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 8/26/07, Aude audevivere@gmail.com wrote:
I tried Commonist. It crashed halfway through with half the files supposedly transferred, when my internet connection dropped
briefly. None
Feh. Improving that tool (or providing something like it) should be on our priority list.
What features should the ultimete-upload-tool have?
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
On 8/27/07, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
What features should the ultimete-upload-tool have?
1) It should be reliable, fairly small, easy to install/start up, and cross platform.
2) It should have robust support for metadata collection. It should include things like category suggestion (perhaps polling one of our existing tools onthe backend), geocoding, automatic exif field extraction (date and time, for example).
3) It should force the user to provide the fields we consider mandatory. It should make sure the output is something we'd consider well formed.
4) It should try to pull as much of its behavior from the site as possible, for example it should something like the license selector on the site for its own license selections.
5) It should reduce/remove repetitive typing. You should be able to select a group of files and make the same change to all of them at once.
6) It should support exif manipulation. It should be able to copy user supplied data into EXIF/IPCT/XMP (author, license, copyright, geodata), and stripping useless or privacy harming information (thumbnail, camera serial no, photoshop spookydata).. so hopefully people will stop stripping all exif on their uploads.
7) Crop, rotate, resize. Auto-flipping based on exif orientation data. We don't need to reinvent the gimp here, but it should have some basic utility manipulations.
.. oh.. and it would be really nice if it supported all of the above for video files too. (along with transcoding and the ability to write ogg tags.. but one step at a time) ;)
Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote on Mon, 27 Aug 2007 16:51:27 +0200:
What features should the ultimete-upload-tool have?
It should measure the bandwith/upload speed and it should show the spent time and the estimated upload time.
Best regards,
Flo
On 8/27/07, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
What features should the ultimete-upload-tool have?
Ability to enter a license in this format: {{pd-user|soandso}} instead of just a drop-down menu. Those have limited options and don't take into consideration the more obscure templates or those with multiple fields for input.
Another nice feature for the ultimate upload tool would be a red/green light that displays when you enter a category name so you don't have to go searching on-wiki for categories, or even a feature that displays subcats of your chosen category so you can further refine the cats to place the image where it belongs.
Batch edit options are great, choices to use the {{information}} template automatically or allow you to format the page yourself in one box is helpful, automatic numbering if you give files the same name is a standard feature, checking on-wiki to see if an image of that name exists should be another red light/green light thing when you enter the title, etc. etc. etc.
Those are just a few I can think of off the top of my head :)
On 8/27/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/26/07, Aude audevivere@gmail.com wrote:
I tried Commonist. It crashed halfway through with half the files supposedly transferred, when my internet connection dropped briefly. None
Feh. Improving that tool (or providing something like it) should be on our priority list.
I would like to mention (again) that there is upload-from-http capability in MediaWiki already, only not reviewed and disabled. Writing a toolserver script to mass-transfer images from a http/ftp site would likely be trivial if this were enabled.
Go bug the admins ;-)
Cheers, Magnus