Photo credits

Where the photographs come from

Town photography on TerraNova comes from Wikimedia Commons, the free-media archive behind Wikipedia. We do not commission, buy or generate photographs.

Which photograph represents a town is not our choice either. We read Wikidata's P18 — the “image” property, where Wikidata's editors record the picture that best stands for a place. For Santiago de Compostela that is the cathedral. Where a town has no such image, or the image turns out to be a locator map or a coat of arms rather than a photograph, the town keeps a plain colour gradient instead. We would rather show nothing than show you the wrong place.

No photograph on this site is AI-generated. A synthesised “photo” of a real town is a picture of somewhere that does not exist, and that is the same problem as an invented statistic.

Licences

Most of Commons is published under Creative Commons licences that permit reuse on the condition that the author and the licence are named. That is why a credit sits on every photograph on the site rather than only here — and why a photograph whose licence we cannot read is never displayed at all.

Across the 51,021 photographs currently in the library:

Counted from the image library itself, not estimated. The figure moves when the library is refreshed.

Finding the original

Every credit is a link. The author's name opens that photograph's file page on Wikimedia Commons, which carries the full description, the upload history, the exact licence text and the highest-resolution version. The licence name links to the licence deed itself.

If you are reusing a photograph you found here, credit the photographer from the Commons file page rather than copying our short label — the file page is the authoritative record, and some photographs carry attribution requirements more specific than a one-line credit can express.

Corrections

If a photograph misrepresents a town, is attributed to the wrong person, or should not be here at all, tell us and we will remove it. Two things are worth knowing: because the choice of photograph comes from Wikidata, correcting it there fixes it for everyone who uses that data, not only for us — and because we re-read those sources periodically, an upstream correction will reach this site on its own.

The data behind the scores

The photographs are the smallest part of what this site is built from. The grades come from official open data — national statistics institutes, land registries, seismic and wildfire archives, OpenStreetMap — and every indicator names its own source and vintage on the town's own page.