Sydney Harbour at night during New Year's Eve celebrations in 2012/2013. Photograph by ТимофейЛееСуда used under CC BY 2.0

The Weekly Writing Tips are a collection of best practices for writing and reporting at Global Voices. January's tips are brought to you by Amira, regional editor for the Middle East and North Africa.

Hello Fellow GVers!

Welcome to January’s Writing Tips where we are breaking from the norm and starting a new experiment, where the tips will result in collaborative posts which we will be writing together, focusing on a different theme and post format each week for the rest of the month.

This week’s exercise is on using and embedding photographs in GV posts. Our focus is: How did netizens capture New Year’s celebrations in photographs. The result will be a cross-regional post we will be writing together.

How to Choose Photographs?

You just need to remember GV’s mandate when choosing photographs: We report on citizen media. All pictures we use should be taken by netizens and shared on social media.

Please take time to go through our GV Guide on using images in posts. Here’s a review of some of the points:

Steps to upload and insert an image:

• Ensure you have permission to use the image.
• Find the largest version of the image available (ideally over 800px wide).
• Download the file to your own computer.
• Rename the file so that its name is descriptive. This is important because Google shows results based on image names having keywords. For example:
  • Bad: IMG003893.jpg
  • Good: bangladeshcomputerlab.jpg
• Upload the file to WordPress. Click the Add Media button above the post editor, then the “Upload Files” link in the popup.
• Fill in the image metadata fields (described below) with as much detail as possible.
• Choose the alignment, link and size settings that fit your image.
• Use the Insert into Post button to add it to the post.
  • The image will go where the cursor was before you pushed the Add Media button.

How do you choose the image? How do you verify the photograph and know that it is indeed taken by the person sharing it online? Here are some links to help you in this process:

Google reverse image search

Tineye

What else do we look for? COPYRIGHT

Our GV guide has the answers to all the questions you may have: check it out here.

Now what?

Now share with us a photograph which shows how people ring in the New Year in your country which we can then use in a cross-regional post.

Happy New Year! Please send in your submissions as soon as you can. I hope to write the post on January 1.