MobileFrontend/Photo upload

The ability to upload photos is a form of content contribution that is particularly suitable for nearly all mobile devices. Recently, community-led projects such as Wiki Loves Monuments used contribution of photos as a major form of increasing new participation in Wikimedia projects and bringing high-quality content to Wikimedia Commons that can improve the quality of articles in Wikipedia. The software that met the initial needs of that project is called Upload Wizard, and that has become a standard way to contribute photos to Commons.

Upload of photos from mobile devices will follow existing usage patterns, such as sharing content with friends, storing content online, or viewing/contributing content based on location. High-quality photos tend to be large and moving them from a device to another location can involve batch transfers via WiFi. The typical use cases are described below. Some solutions have already been developed, as noted below.

The main goal of this new project is to develop a comprehensive approach to photo uploads across a wide range of mobile devices, using a browser or app, and in two forms: direct upload to Commons (aka Photo Upload Basic) and upload from a Wikipedia article or other front-end (aka Photo Upload Advanced).

One constraint that must be clarified up front is that iOS devices do not offer file access from a web browser. This means that browser-based upload is not easy to enable on iPhone or iPad. Device detection in that case must exclude usage of browser-based upload and reference an app-based approach.

Usage patterns
Usage patterns are general areas of usage which often have many use cases within them. The analysis here will focus on patterns and then use cases will be added as necessary.

Three main usage patterns relating to photos on mobile devices are:


 * sharing with others
 * storing online or on PC
 * location-based viewing

Of course, there is also the basic behavior of taking photos, which is often related to locations or social interaction.

For our purposes here, sharing refers to sharing directly from a mobile device. Services such as Picassa and Flickr are clearly designed for sharing, but also for storage, so they will be included in both the first and second patterns.

An additional usage pattern that is specific to Wikipedia is:


 * adding a photo to an article

Within this pattern, there is a specific use case of:


 * seeing an article nearby that needs a photo and contributing one

And a use case specific to Commons and Wiki Loves Monuments is:


 * taking and uploading photos for specific monuments, usually based on a list in a web page

Here are more details:

Sharing
Sharing photos or other content such as videos and URLs is typically a contextual behavior. Meaning, when the user is browsing through photos, he or she gets the idea to share one or more of them.

Therefore, functionality to support this behavior mostly falls outside of the browser or app, and a volunteer developer has already created a plugin-style app that adds Commons to the list of sharing destinations vis Android Intents. This is not possible to do on iOS (unless someone can get access to the internals of the photo viewing application developed by Apple).

Here is the app, as well as other apps that were developed for the Weekend of Code challenge in October, 2011.

Nearby article needing a photo
When viewing Wikipedia articles that are nearby, sue of them may be lacking photos or may need better photos. Users may notice this incidentally, by simply navigating to nearby articles, or we can present such articles to the user with a function in the site or apps.

Wiki Loves Monuments
Or participating in a volunteer program to add photos of notable monuments to Commons.