Retrieving image license and author information in wiki commons

Question

I am trying to use the wikimedia API for wiki commons at:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php

It seems like the commons API is very immature

Answer 1

have a look at Mediawiki and try this function:

import json, requests
def extract_image_license(image_name):

    start_of_end_point_str = 'https://commons.wikimedia.org' \
                         '/w/api.php?action=query&titles=File:'
    end_of_end_point_str = '&prop=imageinfo&iiprop=user' \
                       '|userid|canonicaltitle|url|extmetadata&format=json'
    result = requests.get(start_of_end_point_str + image_name+end_of_end_point_str)
    result = result.json()
    page_id = next(iter(result['query']['pages']))
    image_info = result['query']['pages'][page_id]['imageinfo']

    return image_info

then you call the function and pass in the image name you want to query for example:

extract_image_license('Albert_Einstein_Head.jpg')