Wikipedia:Picture tutorial

If you need help uploading an image, or selecting a suitable image for an article, see the image use policy and the Manual of Style. Images on most websites are copyrighted and should not be uploaded; see the copyright policy. Please upload the highest resolution image possible, but keep the file size under 100 megabytes.

Before you add an image to an article, view the image's image description page to make sure its copyright status is clearly stated, preferably with one of the image copyright tags.

A typical picture can be inserted with a line [[File:...|thumb|...]] as shown below. (Image: can be substituted for File: with no change in effect; the choice between the two is purely a matter of editorial preference.) Using thumb generates a thumbnail, a picture that is typically sized differently from the original image. Several options can affect a thumbnail's placement and size.

By default a thumbnail is floated to the right of the page, with the text flowing around it. However, our first example specifies left. Just below the example you can see what the resulting picture looks like:

Although the above text may appear in multiple lines for formatting purposes, the actual image text is on one line, as it uses spaces without any line breaks. The [[ and the first | must be on the same line; other spaces and line breaks are ignored if they are next to | characters or just inside the brackets. Some parts of the image syntax, such as the alt=, do not allow spaces or line breaks, and the easiest way to get it right is to omit unnecessary spaces and line breaks.

Here is the same example again, this time in the context of some colored lorem ipsum dummy text with asterisks (*) showing where the image syntax appears in the text:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.*

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