Wikimedia Commons Scraper — Free Images & Media (No API Key)

Scrape free, reusable images and media from Wikimedia Commons at scale. Give the Actor a list of search terms and it returns clean, structured records for every matching file — direct file URL, author/artist, license, usage terms, description, categories, dimensions and more. No API key, no login, datacenter-proxy friendly.

Wikimedia Commons hosts 100M+ freely licensed media files (public domain and Creative Commons). This Actor turns that library into a ready-to-use dataset for image sourcing, machine-learning pipelines, content and design workflows, and research.

Features

• No API key required — uses the public MediaWiki API.
• Datacenter-proxy friendly — clean JSON endpoint, no browser needed.
• Rich metadata — direct URL, artist, license, usage terms, description, credit, categories, dimensions, MIME type, uploader.
• HTML cleaned — author/description/credit fields are stripped of HTML for direct use.
• Multi-query — pass many search terms in one run.
• Cheap & fast — lightweight HTTP requests, pay only for what you collect.

Input

Field	Type	Description
mode	select	Scraping mode. search runs your text queries against the Commons file namespace.
queries	array	One or more search terms (e.g. ["sunset", "golden gate bridge"]).
maxItems	integer	Max total media files to collect (default 100, max 1000).

Example input

{
  "mode": "search",
  "queries": ["sunset", "golden gate bridge"],
  "maxItems": 100
}

Output

Each item is one media file:

{
  "page_id": 312884,
  "title": "File:Sunset 2007-1.jpg",
  "url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Sunset_2007-1.jpg",
  "description_url": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sunset_2007-1.jpg",
  "width": 2789,
  "height": 1980,
  "size": 1327087,
  "mime": "image/jpeg",
  "uploader": "Alvesgaspar",
  "artist": "Alvesgaspar",
  "license": "CC BY-SA 3.0",
  "usage_terms": "Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0",
  "description": "Sunset at Porto Covo, Portugal.",
  "credit": "Own work",
  "date": "2007",
  "categories": ["Sunsets", "Porto Covo"],
  "source": "wikimedia_commons",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-20T00:00:00+00:00"
}

Pricing

Priced to be cheap: roughly ~$0.5 per 1,000 media files. You only pay for the items you collect. Costs scale linearly with maxItems.

Use cases

• Free image sourcing — find openly licensed images for blogs, apps and products.
• ML / AI datasets — build labelled image datasets with license provenance baked in.
• Content & design — pull illustrations, photos and diagrams with proper attribution.
• Research — study licensing, categories and media metadata across topics.

Licensing note

Files on Wikimedia Commons are freely licensed, but many require attribution or share-alike terms. Always respect each file's license / usage_terms and credit the artist when required.

Related Actors

• Openverse Media Scraper
• Met Museum Scraper
• Art Institute of Chicago Scraper
• Wikipedia Scraper

Keywords

wikimedia commons scraper, free images api, creative commons images, public domain images, image dataset, media scraper, stock photos free, openverse alternative, ml training images, no api key image scraper

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Questions or a custom media source? Reach out on the Actor's Apify page.