🖼 Wikimedia Commons Media Scraper

🚀 Turn Wikimedia Commons into clean media records in one run. Pull file metadata by search query, by category, or by exact File titles straight from the official MediaWiki API.

Wikimedia Commons hosts over 100 million freely licensed images, audio, and video files. This Actor reads its public MediaWiki API and returns one tidy record per media file, with the full file URL first so previews work instantly. Point it at a search term, a category, or a list of File: titles and get back the metadata that matters for reuse and attribution.

Coverage is whatever Commons exposes through prop=imageinfo: the original file URL and a thumbnail, dimensions and byte size, MIME type, uploader, plus the license, author, credit, description, and category list pulled from the file's extmetadata.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Content and media teams	Source freely licensed images with attribution
Wiki and dataset builders	Seed a library from a category or search
Researchers and archivists	Catalog open media with license and author data
App and bot developers	Feed image lookups without scraping HTML

📋 What the Wikimedia Commons Media Scraper does

This Actor calls the public Wikimedia Commons MediaWiki API and returns one clean record per media file for the mode you choose:

• Search — run a full text file search and collect matching files with full metadata.
• Category — list every file in a category, with or without the Category: prefix.
• Titles — fetch an exact list of File: pages you already know.

Every record leads with the image URL, carries license and author fields parsed out of the HTML extmetadata, and includes a scrapedAt timestamp. Files that do not exist are reported as error records, not silently dropped.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: artist, categories, credit, dateOriginal, description, descriptionUrl, height, imageUrl, licenseShortName, licenseUrl, mime, pageId, scrapedAt, size, thumbUrl, title, uploader, usageTerms, width. All 19 field names come from a real production run, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account using this sign-up link.
2. Open the Wikimedia Commons Media Scraper.
3. Pick a mode (search, category, or titles) and fill in the matching field.
4. Set maxItems to the number of records you want.
5. Click Start and grab your results when the run finishes.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection.

⚠️ Disclaimer: independent tool, not affiliated with Wikimedia Commons or the Wikimedia Foundation. Only publicly available data is collected.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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