Wikipedia:Picture Tutorial - Linking Without Displaying

Linking Without Displaying

Let us say you want to link to the picture without displaying it. You can take them to the image page, where it tells them who uploaded it, when, what the copyright status is, etc.:

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Image:Wikipedesketch1.png

You can make the link say anything you want.

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A cartoon centipede reads books and types on a laptop.

When the link is clicked the image is displayed with other text information at a reasonable size. The user can click through the resulting medium-sized image to get to the full size highest resolution image.

You can also send the user directly to the image:

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Media:Wikipedesketch1.png

This says "Media:" instead of "Image:". When the user clicks on the link, the browser goes directly to the image. As before, you can change the text so it says anything you want.

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A cartoon centipede reads books and types on a laptop.

This can be awkward if the image is quite large, for the full size image will be displayed when the user clicks the link.

Finally, you can link to one image from a thumbnail's small double-rectangle icon, but display another image using "|thumb=Displayed image name". This is intended for the rare cases when the Wikipedia software that reduces images to thumbnails does a poor job, and you want to provide your own thumbnail. In the following example, the double-rectangle links to File:Anime stub 2.svg but the image displayed is File:Anime stub.png:

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