sanity-plugin-wikimedia-image-search

This is a Sanity Studio v5 plugin.

Search Wikimedia Commons for freely-licensed images and insert them directly into your Sanity Studio.

Features

• Search 60M+ freely-licensed images from Wikimedia Commons by keyword
• Browse paginated thumbnails and select one or more images
• Images are automatically uploaded to your Sanity dataset
• Attribution metadata (credit line, source URL, description) stored on the asset document

Installation

npm install sanity-plugin-wikimedia-image-search

Usage

Add the plugin to your Sanity configuration:

// sanity.config.ts
import {defineConfig} from 'sanity';
import {wikimediaImageSearch} from 'sanity-plugin-wikimedia-image-search';

export default defineConfig({
  // ...
  plugins: [wikimediaImageSearch()],
});

The plugin registers as an image asset source. When you open any image field, you'll see "Wikimedia Commons" as an option in the asset source dropdown.

Use as the only image source

To replace the default upload option entirely:

import {defineConfig} from 'sanity';
import {wikimediaAssetSource} from 'sanity-plugin-wikimedia-image-search';

export default defineConfig({
  // ...
  form: {
    image: {
      assetSources: () => [wikimediaAssetSource],
      directUploads: false,
    },
  },
});

Use on a single field

import {wikimediaAssetSource} from 'sanity-plugin-wikimedia-image-search'

{
  name: 'photo',
  title: 'Photo',
  type: 'image',
  options: {
    sources: [wikimediaAssetSource],
  },
}

How It Works

1. Open an image field and select Wikimedia Commons from the asset source dropdown
2. Search by keyword — results come from the Wikimedia Commons MediaWiki API (action=query with generator=search)
3. Browse paginated thumbnails and select images
4. Selected images are downloaded from Wikimedia and uploaded to your Sanity dataset
5. Attribution is stored on the asset document (creditLine, source, description)

No API key is required — the Wikimedia Commons API is free and public.

Attribution

All images from Wikimedia Commons are freely licensed. The plugin stores attribution metadata on each asset document, including:

• source.name: "wikimedia-commons"
• source.url: Link to the file's Wikimedia Commons page (with full license and creator info)
• creditLine: "Wikimedia Commons"

You can use this metadata to display proper attribution on your site.

Requirements

• Sanity Studio v5
• React 19.2+

Develop & test

This plugin uses @sanity/plugin-kit with default configuration for build & watch scripts.

See Testing a plugin in Sanity Studio on how to run this plugin with hotreload in the studio.

Useful commands

npm run build    # Build the plugin
npm run watch    # Watch for changes and rebuild
npm run lint     # Lint the codebase
npm run format   # Format with Prettier

Release

This repo uses semantic-release in the CI & Release workflow.

Commit types and version bumps

Release behavior follows @semantic-release/commit-analyzer default rules:

• feat: => minor release
• fix: => patch release
• perf: => patch release
• BREAKING CHANGE: footer => major release
• chore:, docs:, style:, test:, and other unmatched commit types => no release

Reference: semantic-release/commit-analyzer

Triggering a release

Run the CI & Release workflow on main with Release new version enabled.

If there are no releasable commits since the latest tag, semantic-release will skip publishing.

License & Content Rights

• The plugin source code in this repository is licensed under MIT.
• Images imported from Wikimedia Commons are not covered by this MIT license.
• Each imported asset keeps its own upstream license terms (for example, CC BY, CC BY-SA, Public Domain), which are shown on the file description page.
• You are responsible for complying with the license terms of each imported image, including attribution and share-alike requirements where applicable.
• The plugin stores attribution metadata (source, creditLine, and description) to help you render proper credit in your project.

MIT © Simon Gowing