Guild Wars Wiki:Formatting/Images

This article outlines formatting guidelines that should be followed for images uploaded to the official Guild Wars Wiki.

General guidelines

 * Crop the image to eliminate unecessary space and focus on the image subject. Users do not need to see your character's face and armor in a picture of the weapon they are holding. Map images may benefit from less cropping so that more points of reference are visible for users.
 * Do not select an NPC or interactive object so that their name (or health bar) is visible in the screenshot. Pressing Shift + Print Screen will hide the game interface during the screen capture.
 * Images of items should not have the mouseover text included as this will be in the article instead.
 * If possible, take screenshots in areas with bright, neutral lighting (i.e. the Isle of the Nameless or Kaineng Center have white light sources, whereas House zu Heltzer is dimly lit with a blue light source). This ensures that the image subject isn't discoloured.
 * Turn towards the lightsource when taking images. If you are taking a picture of an NPC, speak to them so that they turn to face into the light (and their shadow will be behind them).
 * Turn off post processing effects to get rid of distortion from bloom. Post processing makes everything a little more blurry and glow, but reduces the detail you can see in screenshots.
 * Images look best with anti-aliasing and textures set to maximum (you may also be able override the game's maximum settings in your video card settings, but do this at your own risk).
 * Images with reduced effects of image compression are more desirable. An image with a high level of compression artifacts will look pixelated and lose detail.
 * Map screenshots should be taken from the mission map when possible. Mission map screenshots have no clouds and are generally brighter.
 * If you are marking a location on a map it is also helpful to include the route to get to this location.
 * Images should be taken from the game when possible and not from concept art as the image in the game is the one which people will see when playing the game (i.e. for Dervish forms, renders of the form as seen in game are given preference over concept art).
 * If multiple images of the same subject are uploaded, the one that will be kept and used is the one which is found most useful. Following these formatting guidelines should ensure your images are as informative as possible.

File type and naming

 * Use descriptive titles. Suffix the filename with the content description. For example acceptable map names would be "Image:North Kryta Province map.jpg" or "Image:Sol Pyrrhus map.jpg". For images of weapons with multiple skins acceptable names would be "Image:Weapon (skin).jpg" (i.e. "Image:Fire Staff (core).jpg", "Image:Fire Staff (Tyrian).jpg" and "Image:Fire Staff (Canthan).jpg").
 * JPG format should be used for screencaptures as their compression rates are good in relation to image quality.
 * PNG format should be used for icons.
 * GIF format should be used for video clips.
 * Lowercase file extensions should be used for uniformity (i.e. .jpg rather than .JPG).
 * Avoid uploading images of the same subjects under different names. It is better to overwrite an existing image with a better one than to upload it to a new name (unless the current name is not descriptive enough). Images can be reverted back to previous versions if newer ones are deemed to not be improvements.
 * Names are case sensitive so Filename.JPG is considered a different file from Filename.jpg.
 * Use of underscores in image names is unnecessary as the version of MediaWiki used by the official Guild Wars Wiki automatically replaces spaces in file names with underscores.  is the same as.

Image size

 * Although files up to 16 megabytes can be uploaded, there is no need for any image to be that large. Any image that is larger than a few hundred kilobytes can cause issues for people trying to view the page that it is used on, so it is recommended that images be no larger than 500kb.
 * Larger images may be difficult for some users to download or view so it is recommended that you crop images to focus on their subject.
 * Certain programs have settings to save images "for web". This removes unecessary metadata and can reduce file size while retaining high quality.
 * It is not recommended to resize images in an editing program, as MediaWiki can scale images automatically. Uploading a large image that is cropped neatly means that higher amounts of detail can be seen if necessary. If you need to upload a full resolution screenshot and cropping is out of the question, consider resizing it to 800x600 or 1024x768 (whichever can be used without a huge loss of information).
 * If you wish to have a photo beside the text in an article then you may create a "thumbnail" by adding  after the image name (e.g.  ). If needed, you can also manually edit the size of the thumbnail by adding   at the end, where * is the width in pixels (200px to 250px is recommended). Larger images should generally be a maximum of 550 pixels wide so that they can comfortably be displayed on 800x600 monitors. You can also specify which side the thumbnail floats to by using   or   (right is the default value) or add a caption by putting   at the end too.

Licensing and copyrights

 * Tag all images with the applicable license template.
 * Images that violate the terms of use of this website or infringe copyright will be subject to deletion.
 * See Guild Wars Wiki:Copyrights for more details.

Free and open-source image editing software
DISCLAIMER: This section describes software written by a third party. The Official Guild Wars Wiki does not endorse, explicitly or otherwise, the use of any third party tools. As with all third party software, the user should investigate the tool themselves and take precautions prior to installation in order to protect their privacy and security.

These free and open source software packages have been recommended by Wikipedians for use in image and media manipulation:
 * The GIMP — General image editor. (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X)
 * ImageMagick — Image conversion and transformation suite. (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X)
 * GraphicsMagick — A clone of ImageMagick emphasizing consistency of the programming API and end-user command-line options. (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X)
 * Paint.NET — Image editing software based on the .NET platform. (Windows)
 * Inkscape — Vector graphics editor. (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X)