See Archive 1 for the RFC establishing COM:OVERWRITE as guideline. This is the talk page about this guideline. Please use the upload help or a help desk in your language for questions about its application.

semi-protected edit request

In the section: DO NOT overwrite § Exceptions to the minor changes rule

Please change

• Digital restoration

to

• Digital restoration (of historical documents/artworks)

Emdosis (talk) 06:43, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

(Or alternatively, any uploads that are historically relevant. If they are not, I don't see why digitally restoring an image of a picture of someone's pet for example, should have to be uploaded as a separate upload, especially when the original upload is extremely blurry and/or low quality.) Emdosis (talk) 17:44, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

Users who ignore the policy

Is there a place to notify about users who are made aware of the policy, but ignore it? Is it enough to remove autopatrol rights? I'm sure most of their other contributions are very helpful. For example, File:Coat of arms of West Virginia.svg was replaced by an entirely different version, and the user persisted after being informed on their talk page. It appears that same user is overwriting File:Great Seal of the United States (reverse).svg, a copyrighted version done long ago by a contributor here, with an entirely different version from another source, breaking the copyright attribute and the like. Carl Lindberg (talk) 01:44, 30 July 2025 (UTC)

@Clindberg: COM:ANU. Glrx (talk) 17:14, 30 July 2025 (UTC)

@Clindberg: I've left a notice on his talk page to cease these violations. Please ping me if you see this behaviour continue. — Huntster (t @ c) 20:34, 30 July 2025 (UTC)

What about losslessly recompressed images?

e.g. by 'optipng' or 'jpegoptim' which don't make any visible change but reduce the file size? --RokerHRO (talk) 19:09, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

@RokerHRO: For me, compressing and overwriting an image is a hard NO. Use the original JPEG. Any further compression will lose information. Something that is not a visible change to one person may be a visible change to another. The compression will not "save" any storage bits because Commons keeps all versions of a file around; the overwrite is less efficient because it will use more storage. If the further compression is small (say 10 percent), there is little point. If the further compression is large (say >50 percent), then it is much more likely that there are visual changes. Too many editors go on pointless optimization quests that provide no real benefit to Commons and disturb other editors by tickling their watch lists. Glrx (talk) 22:07, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

jpegoptim can be lossless, so little harm. I don't think this policy should block it. But that said, I tend to agree with Glrx -- there usually isn't much point. It's not saving disk space overall, since the original is still saved and takes up the same disk space as before; we are now taking up the additional space used by the new version as well. The usual reason to use those tools does not exist here. If it makes the resulting jpg faster to process, maybe I could see it, but usually the changes are marginal. Reducing the size of SVGs is often even more pointless -- doesn't necessarily make them any easier to edit or process (though I have seen ones that significantly simplified them and made them easier to edit, so it can make sense on occasion). But, I think they fall under "Minor improvements", so not a reason to disallow them -- this policy exists for other reasons to me. Carl Lindberg (talk) 00:16, 6 August 2025 (UTC)

Hi, I agree with Glrx. Compressing and overwriting an image is completely useless on Commons. It doesn't save space, only increases space used on the servers. Yann (talk) 17:31, 6 August 2025 (UTC)

Permission

Why do I need permission to overwrite a file uploaded by another user with a higher resolution version (i.e. why is the default behavior to disallow this, contrary to most other functionality on Wiki projects)? Moreover, what permissions is actually required to do this regularly - only admin? OceanLoop (talk) 17:42, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

@OceanLoop:

Please read the second paragraph of COM:Overwriting existing files. It answers both your questions.

Addressing higher resolution in particular, higher resolution may not be better. Many editors have uploaded scaled originals that do not add any new information. In other cases, users have uploaded higher resolution images that are inferior. IIRC, that happened to an image of Winston Churchill. More pixels do not necessarily improve an image. We want editors to use good judgment. Glrx (talk) 17:44, 17 August 2025 (UTC)

Revision request

I tried to update File:Look-back time by redshift.png and File:Age by redshift.png for the new furthest observation just confirmed in the past week, but my account is apparently too new to overwrite the image files. The new images with the 2025 furthest object are at https://i.ibb.co/HTn7sbnm/lookback-time-by-redshift.png and https://i.ibb.co/xqnw7jPh/age-by-redshift.png respectively. I would appreciate if someone could please upload those new revisions, or give me the right to do so. Thank you! AstroMartine (talk) 02:26, 9 October 2025 (UTC)