Wikipedia:Graphics Lab/Maintenance/Images for cleanup

This page is not for listing possible copyright problems or untagged images. For those, go to Wikipedia:Possible copyright infringements and Wikipedia:Untagged Images.

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WP:IFC

Images for cleanup

Images for cleanup (Ifc) is where images with technical problems are displayed for users who are willing to fix, restore, and improve them.

If you find an image that needs improvement, add {{ifc}} to its description page. A few words about how you would like to see the image improved will also help.

Images tagged with {{ifc}} can be found at Category:Image files for cleanup.

Examples of image technical problems

Bordered - The image has unneeded borders or frames.
Watermarks - The image contains captions, dates, or symbols, usually to indicate copyright status and links.
Weak quality - Image may have inappropriate quality such as bad hue, contrast, EV, grained, or saturation.
Unpreferred formatting - The image may be better if it were in a different format (jpg, png, svg, etc.).
Description & information - The image may lack description, date, licensing, or author.

Images with unnecessary borders

Some images present borders that are not necessary and contain redundant information (such as description texts). These include images with excess white "padding" on the sides.

Example: --
What to do: trim the image to the relevant area only. If it's a JPEG image, please, perform a lossless crop with a tool like jpegtran.

JPEG images that should be PNG

(More about image formating) Certain images (practically anything but photos) look and work better as PNG. These generally include flags, graphics, icons, diagrams and certain screenshots (such as from old video or arcade games.)

Example: --
What to do: remake the image or retouch it (making it sharp) using image editing software. More information can be found at Wikipedia:How to reduce colors for saving a JPEG as PNG. Note: you should not just convert JPEG files into PNG files without doing anything else, since this won't improve quality and will just make a larger file.

PNG photos that should be JPEG

PNG is not an efficient format for photographs. These should be converted to JPEG to save space.

What to do: save the PNG on your computer, open it with an image editing program and save or export the file in JPEG format. Try saving with different quality settings and choose the lowest quality (highest compression) that maintains the appearance of the image.

Pictures that need to be retouched, trimmed and scaled

These include images with captions that are too small to read or photos that contain irrelevant surroundings. Dark and unclear pictures should also be properly modified. Background color of graphics and diagrams should be white or transparent.

Low quality pictures

Some pictures just aren't pretty looking, and new versions with higher quality should be found and used instead.

What to do: make or look for a substitute. Be very careful if you use the image search feature in most search engines; the vast majority of pictures on the Internet will be unsuitable for the Commons because of copyright problems.