As mentioned above, for any given file, Commons is concerned with the copyright laws in its "home country" and in the United States. (For files from the United States and its overseas territories, there is no separate "home country", and only U.S. laws apply.) We need a license if relevant content is copyrighted in the U.S. or in the home country.

Usually the copyright for a given work belongs to the author of the work for their lifetime, and then passes as part of their estate to a specific individual or entity either designated explicitly as heir to their intellectual property or inheriting that as part of the residuum of their estate. Many countries also allow some other means of transferring copyright. The two most common are:

• Transfer of copyright to an employer for works created as part of your job.
• Transfer of copyright by written conveyance.

Some countries also allow (or have allowed in the past) transfer of copyright when a photograph is taken for a fee, such as a professional photographer with a studio taking family photos. Unfortunately, this is often very difficult to document. Similarly, if all we know is that something is a "family photo" and different members of the family have different heirs, it can be very difficult to know who currently owns the copyright.

Some content involves multiple copyrights. Each of these copyrights could be held by a separate person or organization, and if the material is copyrighted we would licenses from each. We strongly advise that you have quite a bit of experience before even attempting to deal with cases involving multiple copyright-holders other than yourself. For example:

• A recording of a musical performance would involve separate copyrights from the composer, performer, and (if there were creative acts performed in post-processing) possibly a sound engineer.
• Someone in France takes a picture of a building built in the 1990s. France does not recognize freedom of panorama at all, so to license this image, we would need licenses both from the photographer and from the architect of the building.
• Someone in the U.S. takes a picture of a sculpture. The U.S. does not recognize freedom of panorama for sculptures, so to license this image, we would need licenses both from the photographer and from the sculptor.
• Someone in one of the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) takes a portrait photo of a person, with a copyrighted painting prominently in the background. None of these countries recognize freedom of panorama for paintings, so to license this image, we would need licenses both from the photographer and from the painter. (Alternatively, the painting could be cropped out, or covered with a strong Gaussian blur.)
• Someone makes a composite image. All of the copyrights of images used would be relevant, as would that of the person who composed them.
• Some files (especially things like PDFs with many photos by different photographers) may raise difficult—even insurmountable—issues because so many copyright-holders are involved.

Also along these lines: typically, the only relevant copyright for a photo of a two-dimensional work of art such as a painting is the copyright of the artwork (the photograph reproducing the artwork usually does not involve copyrightable creative content). However, for example, an image of a framed artwork including the frame, or of several artworks mounted together on a wall, is likely to involve a second copyright, for the photographer.

• 
  Using a strong Gaussian blur to cover a copyrighted image for which we lack a license.
• 
  Composite of two photos showing the same hall more than a century apart.
• 
  The logos on the cap and T-shirt here are de minimis.
• 
  Commons has concluded that in a country (in this case Georgia) with no freedom of panorama, the inclusion of copyrighted buildings in a broad cityscape image like this is de minimis.

Incidental inclusion (de minimis inclusion) of a copyrighted work within a larger work does not normally require getting a license for the incidentally included work. For example, consider:

• a photograph of someone with a copyrighted logo on their T-shirt; unless that logo were a prominent feature of the photograph, for our purposes we could ignore the copyright status of that logo.
• a photograph of a city skyline in a country with no freedom of panorama. If no particular building was prominently featured, we could probably ignore the copyright status of any given building.

Note that, despite these images being OK for Commons, we would not accept cropping the image to emphasize the offending element. For example, we would not allow you to crop the image of Batumi, Georgia above to emphasize one particular copyrighted building without getting a free license from the architect.

Occasionally the "home country" of a work can be difficult to determine. Again, some rules of thumb:

• In terms of freedom of panorama, we usually defer to the laws of the country depicted.
• If a photo is taken across a border, from one country into another country, either country may legitimately be taken as the home country (but not one for some aspects of the law, and the other for others). You can opt for the country with more liberal copyright laws.
• For a visual work that first appeared in a print publication, for most purposes other than freedom of panorama, the country of publication wins out over the country depicted or the country of which the photographer is/was a citizen.
  • When a work was first published simultaneously in multiple countries, it is our prerogative which country to consider the country of publication. For copyright purposes, any publication within 30 days of first publication is considered simultaneous.

There are an enormous number of PD tags. Commons prefers that you use the most precise PD tag applicable to a given file. There can be a bit of a learning curve involved in this, but all such tags should be in the hierarchy under Category:PD license tags, and on the whole the subcategory names should be self-explanatory, even if some of the names of individual tags are a bit less so. If you know something is in the public domain but cannot work out exactly how best to tag it, upload it with your best guess, then come to Commons:Village pump/Copyright, better known as VP/C to ask for further help.

For genuinely old works, some the most useful tags are

• {{PD-old-auto-expired|YEAR}}: work published before 1930, with a known author who died in the specified YEAR (long enough ago to be out of copyright in its home country).
• {{PD-old-100-expired}}: work published long enough ago that we are confident the author has been dead at least a century, even if their exact death date is unknown.

For U.S. federal government works, there is an entire hierarchy of tags under Category:PD-USGov license tags. Please try to use the most specific one you can identify.

Only the holder of the copyright can grant a license. Just like you can't give someone permission to use your neighbor's car, Person A cannot grant a license to use something Person B owns! See Commons:license laundering for more detail.

The most common tool to upload to Commons is Special:UploadWizard. The wizard does a very good job of guiding you through uploading images that are already free-licensed on Flickr, so we won't cover that in the step-by-step guide that follows.

1. Note the source information for the content you are uploading.
   • The most common case is that the file is already online as an individual image. You will typically need:
     • A stable URL of a publicly accessible page showing the image. For example, if it is on Facebook, you would click on the timestamp of the original post to get a Facebook page specific to that post.
     • If there is more than one image at that prior URL, you will typically also want a stable URL of the image itself for clarity.
     • If the statement granting a license is not on that same web page, then you will want a URL for that as well.
   • If you are using another sort of source (e.g. it came from an old book or magazine, or if it is within a PDF)
     • Try to provide source information comparable to what is used for en:Template:Cite book in the English-language Wikipedia. (See File:Elton E. Ainsworth.jpg for an example.)
     • If you are depending on a license, rather than a public domain rationale, and the bibliographic information for the license is distinct from that of the photo, keep track of that.
2. One or another way, get the file you are uploading onto your own PC.
3. Navigate to Special:UploadWizard, "drop" the file onto the upload page and click "Continue".
4. Select "This work was created by someone else and it is free to share."
5. As appropriate, click either "The creator has released or published this work under a free license" or "This work is not protected by copyright law"
   • If the appropriate license or PD rationale is listed, select that; otherwise, you may need to track down the relevant license tag for the "Enter a different tag" / "Add a specific public domain tag" field. The hierarchy under Category:License tags may help. If you can't find the right tag, you may need to come to Commons:Help desk for assistance.
6. Indicate where you found the work (the URLs or other bibliographical information from step 1; this is a freeform field, and if you need to say something complicated, you can).
7. Indicate, to the best of your ability the name of the author. If may be that the best you can do is a company, or a website, or "found in a book authored by XX" Do the best you can. In the worst case, there is a box to check for "unknown".
8. Click next.
9. The rest of this works just like uploading something you created yourself. Do be careful to give the most accurate date you can.

Also, remember: this is a wiki. Nothing is "final". Check your file page after uploading; if there is something you need to tweak, do so. The most common thing you will want to change on the file page after uploading licensed (not PD) content from an online source: because the source site might later change its content ("link rot"), we recommend that you request license review: an administrator or trusted license reviewer can verify the current license while the source is still available. For the special Flickr case mentioned above, the UploadWizard requests this automatically, but it does not do this when you upload from your own device, even if you credit an online source. Instead, you have to edit the file page for the newly uploaded file, and add a license review tag. Typically this goes just below the license tag (or PD tag). The most generic license review tag is {{LicenseReview}}, but Category:License review tags contains others that are specific to some particular sources, probably most notably {{YouTubeReview}}.

Other examples of things often worth changing:

• The date input in the UploadWizard is a bit inflexible (it wants a precise date). You can always go back afterward and edit in something like 1897 or {{other date|between|1910-01|1918-06}} or {{circa|1923}}. If you are trying to express a particular statement about date, author, etc. and don't know how, ask at Commons:Help desk: indicate what you want it to mean, and someone will be able to tell you how best to express that using wikitext and existing templates.
• For authors of encyclopedic notability, we often have a "Creator" template that provides more information than just the person's name as author. For example, if you were uploading a photo by Norwegian photographer Anders Beer Wilse, it is best to credit him as {{Creator:Anders Beer Wilse}}, which displays in the "Author" field of {{Information}} as:

Anders Beer Wilse (1865–1949)
	Alternative names	Wilse Christiania
	Description	Norwegian photographer Robert Charles Wilse的父親
	Date of birth/death	12 June 1865	21 February 1949
	Location of birth/death	Flekkefjord Municipality	Oslo
	Work period	1900–49
	Work location	Kristiania (Oslo), Kragerø, Seattle
	Authority file	: Q144339 VIAF: 11872032 ISNI: 0000000037452319 LCCN: no92001066 Open Library: OL465293A GND: 1061736962 BIBSYS: 90105880 KulturNav: 2b94216b-f2fc-46a3-b2ce-eeb93aa19185 RKD: 402220 J9U: 987007281146405171 WorldCat

The user can click on that little arrow on the top line to expand this and see more information about this creator.

If you are having trouble working out who would own the relevant copyright(s) for particular content, the best place to ask is Commons:Village pump/Copyright. Please be as specific as you can be with your question. It is often useful to give both the URL of the content itself and the URL of the page you found it on.

If the copyright-holder already licenses some of their content under some appropriate free license, or if you know that some license will be convenient for them, it is a lot easier to ask them to grant that license than a different one. As of August 2025, many sites offer good support to license files under {{CC-BY 4.0}} and {{CC-BY-SA 4.0}}, but if (for example) a particular site makes it easier to offer {{CC-BY 2.0}} and/or {{CC-BY-SA 2.0}}, those are completely acceptable. COM:VRT#When contacting VRT is unnecessary links to pages describing the best ways to do this on many sites that are common sources.

As of 2025 our preferred licenses are:

• {{CC-BY-SA 4.0}} - this is the most restrictive license accepted by Commons. It requires that re-users attribute the work when reusing it; that derivative works make it clear what they have changed; and that derivative works are similarly licensed.
• {{CC-BY 4.0}} - the same, except that derivative works do not have to be similarly licensed.
• {{CC-zero}} - this amounts to releasing your work into the public domain. This is a much more difficult ask. It means reusers will not have to attribute. It basically lets go of all control of what happens to the work in the future.

On the other hand, things get trickier if it is less clear who owns the copyright, or if it is not convenient for them to indicate the license online.

Copyright ownership might be unclear because:

• The work in question was published under a pseudonym and it is not obvious what real-world individual owns the rights
• The work in question is already published in multiple places, and not clearly attributed.
• The copyright has been transferred.
• The work contains several elements that are not obviously by a single person.
• You found (for example) a photo as part of the web presence of the subject of the photo, or found an artwork on a gallery site, and it is likely that someone else (the photographer, the artist) owns the copyright.

At this point we need the copyright-owner to go through the "VRT" process: carrying on a confidential email correspondence with the Volunteer Response team, who are designated to handle confidential correspondence for Commons. This is laid out at COM:VRT, and there is no substitute for reading that page. However, the key steps are:

1) Get their basic agreement to do this:

• Identify the owner of the copyright. This may require some legwork and correspondence on your part.
• Contact the owner of the copyright to ask if they would be willing to release the work under a particular free license. You might find it useful at this time to include a draft of the email you would like them to send to VRT, or you might want to go more slowly. en:Wikipedia:Example requests for permission (on the English-language Wikipedia) has some examples of letters to request permission, or you can ask for help at Commons:Permission requests.
• Keep in mind: there are plenty of good reasons for people not to want to free-license their work. The leading reasons would be:
  • Their intellectual property is how they make their living. Almost no one is going to pay a photographer, graphic artist, composer, etc. for something they can use under a free license.
  • They simply prefer to keep tight control of their intellectual property.

If they say no, please be polite about this, it is entirely their prerogative.

2) The copyright-holder—not the Wikimedian involved—needs to send email to VRT to grant or confirm the license. The COM:VRT page contains a sample of the email they would need to send, and also links to a generator to make it easier to generate the text of such an email. The email should also contain copies of the correspondence with you that got things this far. A few key details:

• It is generally best practice for them to CC you on the email, though this is not required, and it is sometimes wise of them to do otherwise where confidentiality might be an issue.
• They need to be clear about what material this covers.
• They need to be clear about what license they are offering. As discussed on the COM:VRT page, this will typically be either CC-zero, CC-BY 4.0, or CC-BY-SA 4.0.
• If the license is not CC-zero, they will probably want to indicate their preferred attribution when the work is reused (e.g. they might want an attribution that mentions both the photographer and an organization).
• Interaction with the VRT tends to be much simpler if they send email from an email address and/or domain that readily demonstrates that they are who they say they are (e.g. a contact email published on their own website, or an email address using the domain of an organization that owns the copyright).
• If the copyright has been transferred, they will need to explain that.
• They should expect that there may need to be a few emails back-and-forth for clarification. If they do not reply, the process will typically fail.

3) There is no specific requirement about when you upload the file. Usually it is simplest to upload it before the copyright-holder sends email, so they can reference the URL of the uploaded file to explain what content they are talking about. If you do that, make sure:

• When you upload, indicate the correct license and use Template:PP (instructions are on that template page) to indicate that permission is pending.
• Please try to make sure that they send the permission promptly. Files that sit too long in the pending state will be deleted, though they can be undeleted if and when permission finally arrives.

The most common tool to upload to Commons is Special:UploadWizard. A step-by-step guide follows.

1. Note the source information for the content you are uploading.
   • If the file is already online as an individual image, you will typically need:
     • A stable URL of a publicly accessible page showing the image. For example, if it is on Facebook, you would click on the timestamp of the original post to get a Facebook page specific to that post.
     • If there is more than one image at that URL, you will typically also want a URL of the image itself for clarity; failing that, some way to explain how to find the image once you navigate to the page via the URL.
   • If you are using another sort of source (e.g. it came from an old book or magazine, or if it is within a PDF)
     • Try to provide source information comparable to what is used for en:Template:Cite book in the English-language Wikipedia. (See File:Elton E. Ainsworth.jpg for an example.)
   • Failing that, "Image provided by [SOMEBODY]" is also a source.
2. Know what license the copyright-holder is offering.
3. One or another way, get the file you are uploading onto your own PC.
4. Navigate to Special:UploadWizard, "drop" the file onto the upload page and click "Continue".
5. Select "This work was created by someone else and it is free to share."
6. Choose "I have permission to upload this work from my employer or the creator of this work." If you or they have not already drafted a release email, you can use the release generator to do so at this time, but remember that (as described at COM:VRT) the release must be emailed by the copyright-holder, not by you.
7. Click to verify that you understand that if the email is not sent within 30 days of upload, the file will be deleted.
8. Indicate the source (the URL, etc., described in the first numbered point here).
9. Indicate the author; typically this corresponds to the attribution, but might contain additional information (e.g. "Beauregard Clise, official photographer for the City of New Orleans").
10. Click "Next"
11. The rest of the interaction with the Upload Wizard works just like uploading something you created yourself. Do be careful to give the most accurate date you can for the file.
12. There is one more step: you need to say what license is forthcoming. Without that information, there will only be a seven day grace period to get permission, rather than thirty, and a week is not usually long enough to complete the process. As of April 2025, the development team have committed to get this step into the Upload Wizard, but right now it still has to be done manually.
    • After uploading, you need to go to the file page of the file you just uploaded, and add the license manually. Typically, this will mean adding one of the following license tags (though in some exceptional cases a different license might be involved):
      • {{Cc-zero}}
      • {{Cc-by-4.0}}
      • {{Cc-by-sa-4.0}}

    The license tag should go directly under the permission-pending tag. For licenses that involve attribution, it is best practice to indicate that attribution explicitly within the license tag, e.g. {{cc-by-4.0|attribution=City of New Orleans}}.

If permission is sent promptly and the copyright-holder responds promptly to any questions, the VRT process will usually complete within 30 days. It can be slower if correspondence is in a language other than English. Don't worry too much if the deadline is missed and the file is deleted: it can easily be restored when the process completes.

When the VRT process completes successfully, a member of the VRT will remove the indication that permission is pending, and replace it with a {{PermissionTicket}}.

Typically there is no need for you as uploader to communicate directly with the VRT or its members, but in the rare case where it is necessary, that is usually best achieved through Commons:Volunteer Response Team/Noticeboard.