Thank you Fae for sharing this post (and for uploading those Photocrom images! People who want to see more or use them in WP articles can find them on Commons at Category:Photocrom prints collection)
The GLAMwikiToolset (
project homepage,
mediawiki extension,
user manual) has been in development for several years now at
Europeana. It is a joint funding initiative with several European chapters to develop a standard method for GLAMs (or anyone else for that matter) to mass-upload to Wikimedia Commons on their own terms, without the need to operate bots or be dependent on the subset of volunteers who can to do it for them. While we acknowledge that the system still has bugs and still requires some technical ability (e.g. creating a flat XML file), this is a significant step forward.
The tool has been quietly operational now for a while and has been used for
an interesting variety of uploads, with more coming each week. We hope that with increased usage the system will start to become a standard part of the GLAMwiki repertoire of activities and over time will become easier to use and help draw attention to other related engineering work that needs attention - like multimedia statistics and metadata export.