Sharing your work with the world is much more enjoyable if are part of the community, giving and receiving encouragement, advice and accolades.
Wikimedia Commons has three processes by which high quality works are recognised by the community. The oldest is Featured Pictures (FP) which has existed since late 2004 -- it began when Wikimedia Commons was itself just a few months old. As time has passed it has required a much more rigorous standard of quality, as FP purports to represent "the best of the best". This has created space for other quality initiatives: Quality Images (QI) began in June 2006 and has been outstandingly successful. A third initiative, Valued Images (VI) began in April 2008, and is making slow but steady progress.
Featured Pictures should represent the best of the best, the cream of the crop. This process is one to aspire to, rather than one to begin with: starting with Quality Images will ensure a gentler introduction. If you are keen to make your mark at FP, it's a good idea to put the "Featured picture candidates" page on your watchlist and observe the process for a few weeks or months. Take part in voting and commenting to get a feel for the standards expected.
Other projects also have a Featured Pictures process, however they often have different expectations.
Quality Images (QI) is a great place to start if you already consider yourself an intermediate or advanced graphics creator. The requirements are much easier to meet and the whole process is faster and simpler to complete. As the Quality Images page says, QIs "need not be extraordinary or outstanding, but merely well-composed and generally well-executed". Another difference is that unlike FP, QI must be the work of Wikimedia Commons contributors (ie. not public domain works).
The most significant difference between Valued Images (VI) and QIs/FPs is that VIs should be "the most valuable illustration of their kind" on Wikimedia Commons. One help page advises that "Valued images are less about perfect technical quality and more about your ingenuity in finding good and valuable subjects which matter, and about the useability of the information on the image page." If you have an eye for detail and an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time, VI may be the perfect process for recognising your high quality work.
"Meet our photographers" is a showcase of the most highly skilled and dedicated photographers on Wikimedia Commons, and likewise "Meet our illustrators" for illustrators (typically SVG artists). Contributors that have met a certain benchmark of quality (currently 10 Featured Picture photographs, or 5 Featured Picture illustrations). Each contributor who meets the benchmark is invited to write a profile and choose some of their Featured work to display, as well as advertise their other work by a website link. These pages are prominently linked on the Wikimedia Commons Main Page, as a way of recognising the dedication of these contributors.
Picture of the day (POTD) is a long-running process where each day a different image is displayed on the Wikimedia Commons main page. This is syndicated on several Wikipedias and is also available as an RSS feed. This naturally ensures high visibility for the chosen image!
In the past POTD was an ad-hoc process where anyone could choose more or less any image to be a POTD, with the only real restriction being that the image had not previously been POTD. Over time there has been a tendency towards preferring to choose Featured Pictures. Nowdays, so many images are promoted as Featured Pictures that POTD has been restricted to only Featured Pictures. So if you've had some success with FP, feel free to slot your chosen image in as a POTD some months in the future.
Picture of the Year (POTY) is a competition that has been held in 2006 and 2007, where all the images that achieved Featured Picture status during that year are voted on by the wider Wikimedia community, to choose a single Picture of the Year. In 2006 there were 321 candidates images and in 2007 there were 514. The format and voting mechanism of the competition may change, but the winning picture(s) will undoubtedly receive wide publicity.
As with POTD, this process is restricted to images that have achieved Featured Picture status.
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