Commons:Categories for discussion/2012/02/Category:Pictures and images

[edit] Category:Pictures and images

There are several categories having names starting with "Pictures and images" (not counting redirected cats and one user cat):

If I were to guess, I would say "pictures" was intended to refer to photographs (and scans, etc.) and "images" to computer-created drawings and illustrations, but the terms are at best ambiguous and at worst redundant. I suggest we rename or merge these categories, as appropriate. (See separate nominations below.)

In particular, for Category:Pictures and images I suggest renaming it Category:Images (which is actually a soft redirect to Category:Pictures and images). Note that the category is only really required as a subcat of Category:Media types. - dcljr (talk) 22:20, 21 February 2012 (UTC)

Fair warning, if no one has made any comments on this by March 6th, I'm just going to act unilaterally (as described above). - dcljr (talk) 23:45, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Thats not fair warning let the discussions take their course now you've started them someone independent will close these when there is consensus then you can do what ever the discussion resolves Gnan garra 07:31, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

Actually, two weeks is the typical time for disucssions, according to CFD guidelines. If no one has commented in that time, there's no discussion to "close". Yes, someone will eventually close it, but nothing will have been decided. In such a case, I think it's not unreasonable for the original nominator to take whatever actions they think are best. OTOH, obviously if a discussion has taken place and no consensus is reached, then the original nominator should not act unilaterally. - dcljr (talk) 20:14, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

"Picture" and "image" are near-synonyms.[1][2] Rename/move "Pictures and images" to "images" in the instances above. --Walter Siegmund (talk) 03:10, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
No problems with me. I did already quite some cleanup and renaming. --Foroa (talk) 07:15, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
Redunant and unnecessary if it to stay really some definitions about the structure first, drill down one level on Category:Pictures and images by country and you only get Category:Image sources by country seams to me that the purpose isnt clear I expected to see Category:Pictures and Images of Australia etc. before moving stuff around and changing things what is the intended structure and purpose is there some other format that covers this say like Category:Countries and as such making picture and images by country totally redundant as its a duplicate of what already exists. Gnan garra 07:44, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I hadn't looked at that, that is another mess to clean up :-). Also going the other direction "Media with locations" doesn't belong to "Media types" --Tony Wills (talk) 08:48, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

I removed "Media with locations" from "Media types" as geocoded location information has nothing to do with the "type" of media, it's just information about the location of the camera taking the photo. --Tony Wills (talk) 12:33, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

I see no advantage to renaming it "images", "images" is a far more ambiguous term that covers a myriad of things (eg some PDFs are just scanned images of pages, films (movies) are just "moving images"). "Pictures" is actually just a qualification to "images" (to help people guess what goes in there ;-).

But going back a step, what is the category for, well it is just to distinguish different media types (the word media can if course be taken to mean a lot of things!), but here we have seperate branches for images of texts (pdf djvu), "Timed Text‎" (slide shows of images with annotations?), animated images (generally strung together drawn images, but sometimes strung together photographic images*), and movies/videos (strung together photographic images). "Images" isn't really a distinguishing name, it really encompases all these types, and is really meaningless as a subcategory of media types. What distinguishes media in this category is that they are "static", "individual" images. We could call it "Static images" which is fairly specific, but perhaps not obvious. Perhaps "Photographs and illustrations" would be the least ambiguous (although a little long) but then it may be thought that "photographs" means images of physical photographs.

On balance I think it is hardly worth changing (it will confuse as much as it helps, and will no doubt be renamed again by the next Commons generation who find it ambiguous :-). I would tend towards something like "Static images" (if we are happy to ignore the fact that pdfs are fairly static, and that if anybody asks I would have to say that a "static image" is well, ... just a "picture" :-). --Tony Wills (talk) 08:45, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

PS how about "Pictures and illustrations" ?) --Tony Wills (talk) 08:45, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

I see no reason for a three word title. Possibilities (all from an American English POV)

Images -- most generic, includes all files that do not have an audio component. Is our generic word for such things. This would be my choice to replace "pictures and images" as all the rest are subsets.
Pictures -- ambiguous, some readers will see it as narrowly as "landscapes and portraits", others will read it to include only paintings and drawings. Most readers will think it does not include PDFs of text.
Photographs -- very ambiguous. Many readers will question whether a photograph of a painting belongs here. Or, for that matter, a photograph of any work of art. Does a scan of a photograph in a book belong here? All of these are reasons that we rarely use the term in discussions on Commons.
Illustrations -- more or less synonymous with "pictures" -- a picture is an illustration if it is used to illustrate something, but not if it is simply a thing of beauty. Thus a Monet might be an illustration in an article titled "Works of Monet", but not if it were in a gallery "Beautiful Landscapes".

Jim . . . . Jameslwoodward (talk to me) 13:43, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

I have seen all sorts of combinations of category names combining the words images, pictures, drawings, illustrations, ... and none of them was ever satisfactory.

We have on only 8 Pictures and images categories, thousands of "images of/by/from " categories.

"image:" was the way of designating a file on Commons till a couple of years ago. It still works: Image:Crystal Project image file.png and it will take another ten years or so before all the image:references are updated from all files and docs.

So, I think that we should consider a specific word to designate a file: or electronic medium, but in the mean time, we can go ahead to uniformise the thing, mainly as proposed. --Foroa (talk) 18:16, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Note that this category is linked to from the Main Page, where the three main media types are listed as "Images", "Sounds", and "Videos". So it seems clear that we need some main category for files that aren't sound or video, regardless of what we call it (so, no simple deletion option here). I agree with Foroa that "images" is a common enough name for it. And presumably whoever was involved in putting the "Images" link on the homepage would agree. (Consider also: Google Images, Bing Images, Yahoo! Image search, Getty Images, NASA Images, etc. — "everyone knows" what the word "images" refers to in these contexts, so why should it be so ambiguous here at Commons?) Whatever is decided here (if anything), we probably need a more general Village Pump discussion about the uppermost levels of the category hierarchy, and what types of cats we want there with what names... - dcljr (talk) 23:01, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

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Commons:Categories for discussion/2012/02/Category:Pictures and images

[edit] Category:Pictures and images