Wikimedia Commons is a collection of freely usable media files—images, audio, video, and more—that anyone can contribute to. Perhaps best known as the repository of images that can be used in Wikipedia articles, material from the Commons is available for use more broadly on the web and beyond.

I find myself browsing Wikimedia Commons for various reasons: sometimes I’ve landed there because I was curious about an image I saw in a Wikipedia article, and I end up browsing similar images on the Commons. Other times I’m making a presentation and need an image to illustrate a point.

My motivations for contributing to the Commons stem from this. Sometimes I’m just curious about a place or event and want to share photos so that others can discover it; other times I upload images that I think would be useful for illustrating important concepts. I also see media contributions to the Commons as a way to improve representation online. Others have expressed other reasons to contribute: they may want to preserve history or contribute to shared knowledge.

Does contributing to the Commons really make a difference?

The best way to learn if contributions to Wikimedia Commons have been useful to others might be through conversations with people who have found media files that they needed and whose work was improved by access to this material, or through individuals who contribute to the Commons and have seen their photos circulate in the world. The Queens Daily Eagle noted in 2019 that a photo of the Brooklyn Museum by prolific NYC contributor Jim Henderson had at that point been included by journalists in hundreds of news articles. Henderson’s ongoing work is a reminder of the impact Wikimedia Commons contributions make on local news.

We aren’t always lucky enough to hear from individuals who use our Commons contributions, though. In the absence of testimonies about impact, we can explore a few measurements of use that might translate to how our uploads have made a difference.

Check file usage on other wikis

The first way to see if a file has been used is by taking a look at the list of File Usage on Other Wikis provided on the Commons page for each media file. Take a look, for example, of how my photo of an NYC Compost Bin is currently being used:

Second, GLAMorgan is a handy tool for counting the views of the Wikipedia pages that images in a specific Commons category have been posted on. This is especially useful if an institution or project has uploaded content that is all tagged with the same category. One example at City Tech is the category Fall 2025 Contributions from Communication Design students, CUNY City Tech, which contains student photography. If we plug that category into GLAMorgan we can see that, in the month of March 2026, any wikipedia pages (in various language versions of the encyclopedia) containing the 22 images that students contributed for this project had 15,393 views.

Finally, to understand how people have interacted with my own Commons uploads on wiki projects, I can also explore usage of the wiki pages they’ve been added to directly through Wikipedia’s statistics tools. Let’s look at my compost bin as an example. This photo is embedded in the New York City waste management system article. I can verify on the article’s edit history that the image was added on November 13, 2025. I can then head over to the pageviews tool to see that, between the date it was added and today’s date, this article has had 6,386 pageviews. Did everyone go to that article to see my photo? Absolutely not. But, readers who scrolled down to the section on composting now have an illustration of one type of household compost bin that the city has distributed.

Discover how Commons contributions are used across the web

Some projects have relied on the Google Reverse Image Lookup tool to see how Commons images are used beyond wiki projects, or on web analytics to measure traffic to digital collections they’ve uploaded. 

When I am curious about the re-use of my own contributions on the broader web, I use tools such as Google News, Google Image search tool or Google Scholar to search for my wikipedia username, which should be included in captions for use of some of my Commons contributions because of the attribution license I selected. This helps me find news articles, scholarly publications, and other sites that have made use of my images.