Commons:Uploading works by a third party

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First things first

Very often someone signs up for an account on Wikimedia Commons (hereafter, "Commons"), and the first thing they want to do is to upload third-party content (content someone else created entirely; photos of someone else's copyrighted work; etc.). That's completely understandable: you saw something useful—or just cool—out there and want to add it to Commons. Unfortunately, adding third-party work to Commons is one of the trickiest things a user can do here: it raises every issue that might come up in uploading your own work, plus a slew of additional issues.

This page is intended to guide you through that thicket.

The first thing you need to know is: we haven't made it difficult on purpose. There are real reasons this is difficult. The second thing is: if you need help, ask at Commons:Help desk, but please read this page first or probably the help will consist of telling you to RTFM. We can't write out a custom version of the same instructions for each new user.

The biggest issues you will probably encounter are:

• Understanding copyright.
• Understanding "free licensing".
• Understanding why someone would or would not want to give a free license.
• For content that is not already legitimately free-licensed, you'll also need to learn the further steps to obtain a license (not always possible) and to to put it on Commons once a license is obtained.

Commons' scope

Main page: COM:SCOPE

Before we get to those big issues, a brief note on the Commons' scope (more detail at COM:SCOPE):

• Commons is intended as a repository for files that serve some valid educational purpose. The notion of "educational" is broad, but not all-encompassing.
  • Above all, Commons was conceived as a single place where our sister projects (Wikipedia in various languages; Wiktionary in various languages; Wikivoyage in various languages; Wikisource in various languages; etc.) could store shared media content instead of each needing their own copy.
  • In practice, Commons has come also to be a repository of comprehensive collections of public-domain and free-licensed content that is of educational value but not likely to be of direct use to our sister projects: historic sound recordings, pictures of various countries and cities over time, the works of significant artists, documentation of stage performances, etc. A Wikipedia article would typically want a couple of photos of a singer or politician, or of what a particular part of London looked like in the 1890s; Commons is glad to have dozens, as long as they are not redundant to one another.

What we don't want is:

• Redundant material. (We probably don't need another routine photo of the Eiffel Tower. We definitely don't need a routine photo of anyone's genitals.)
• Content that is probably only of personal interest, though we allow a small number of personal photos to be used on talk pages of people who actively contribute to WMF projects.
• Encyclopedia articles or other texts (some exceptions for facsimiles of historically significant documents).
• Materials in non-free file formats; these need to be converted to "free" formats.

One other thing that we cannot emphasize enough: Commons is intended to host only materials that are either in the public domain or free-licensed both in their home country and in the United States. Much more on this below.

• While not every country in the world has a concept exactly equivalent to the concept of "public domain" that exists in the Common law countries, here on Commons the phrase "in the public domain" can almost always be treated as synonymous with "not copyrighted."

For further discussion of these issues (and others), please see COM:SCOPE.

Understanding copyright

In a nutshell: probably over 95% of anything you find on the Internet is copyrighted, and would require a free license if it is to be uploaded to Commons. Almost nothing that is theoretically copyrightable and was created after the World Wide Web came into being is in the public domain; what little online content is in the public domain is almost all older content repurposed for the Internet.

No short essay is going to turn you into an expert on copyright: people such as copyright lawyers spend their lives learning the subtleties of copyright. There are, however, a few basics and rules of thumb that you need to know:

• Every country has its own copyright laws. While many of them are similar, almost all have some quirks. To get an overview for the countries with which you are likely to be concerned, start at Commons:Copyright rules by territory. Among the copyright issues that most vary among countries are:
  • Threshold of originality: how complicated does something have to be before it can be copyrighted?
  • Duration of copyright
  • Ability to transfer copyright
  • Whether government works are copyrighted
  • Degree of "freedom of panorama": an exception in some countries allowing photography of copyrighted buildings, two-dimensional artworks, three-dimensional artworks, and/or texts such as copyrighted signs, etc. Different countries do or do not allow each of these, and some put "non-commericial" restrictions on these which are too strict for Commons' notion of a "free license".
• Nowadays, nearly every country and territory in the world subscribes to the Berne Convention. The U.S. was a relative latecomer, adopting the Convention 1 March 1989. Under the Berne Convention content that is eligible for copyright is automatically granted copyright upon creation. For copyrightable content created in a Berne-convention country there is no issue, as there used to be in some countries such as the U.S., of "they didn't copyright that": they did, by creating it.
• Uncreative work does not create new intellectual property rights, including copyright. For example, a faithful photographic reproduction of a 2-dimensional work of art does not have any copyright separate from the work of art, no matter how difficult it was to make.

A few rules of thumb:

• Copyright laws are almost never written with enormous precision, and understanding, for a given country, how particular edge cases are handled is almost always a matter of looking at court decisions, not statute law. Subtle questions may have no definitive answer. Because of Commons precautionary principle, when in doubt as to whether a copyright persists, we strongly prefer to have a license from the plausible claimant to a copyright.
• Anything published anywhere more that 95 years ago (1929 or earlier as of 2025) is in the public domain in the United States. (Sound recordings are a special case, though, and may have slightly longer protection is some cases.)
• All countries have a notion of a threshold of originality—that some things are too simple to copyright—but that threshold is generally different for each country.
• In many countries (but not the United States), anything where the author died more than 70 years ago (1954 or earlier as of 2025) is in the public domain; there are some other countries where that applies only to works published (or, in the case of works of art, displayed) in the author's lifetime, and where the term can extend past that for certain posthumous publications.
• In many countries, corporate works (and in some countries, anomymous works) are protected only for 70 years from creation, regardless of the lifespan of any person; however
  • For films, typically the countries that are concerned with lifespan designate a certain small number of individuals (writer, director, music composer, etc.; it varies by country) as the joint creators, and the work remains copyrighted for 70 years after the last of these dies.
  • "Anonymous" in this context does not simply mean "we don't know the author"; typically it means that the work was published anonymously (or pseudonymously) and no one ever came forward and acknowledged it as their own.
  • For work that is "anonymous" only in the sense that we don't know who authored it—e.g. an old snapshot, or a sketch or painting—it is better to assume that it is still under a copyright, unless we are confident that it is at least 120 years old.
• Copyrights are almost never extinguished by (for example) the dissolution of a corporation or government, and (as noted) they typically persist for 70 years past the lifetime of a particular author. It can be very difficult to identify the heir to these copyrights (successor to a corporation or government; heir to an individual's intellectual property). This means that there are a lot of "orphaned copyrights": the work is not in the public domain, but it is difficult or even impossible to determine who owns the rights and could therefore grant a license.
• Some governments place all or most content they create immediately into the public domain. Most notably, works created by any employee (but not contractors) of the federal government (but not most state or municipal governments) of the United States as part of their job are all in the public domain.
• Commons often notes non-copyright restrictions with tags like {{Trademarked}}, {{Personality rights}}, {{Currency}}, or {{Nazi symbol}}, but there are very few otherwise in-scope images we would exclude from Commons for rights reasons other than (a) copyright and (b) certain issues of consent discussed in photographs of identifiable people (these vary from country to country).
• There are other—generally country-specific—ways some materials lose their copyrights and pass into the public domain. For example, before 1 March 1989 the U.S. required specific notice and/or registration of copyrights, plus renewal after 28 years. See the Hirtle chart for a good overview of how this worked in U.S. copyright law, and why a lot of U.S. materials less than 95 years old (but published before 1 March 1989) lack copyright.

Licensing

If the all or some of the content in a given file is copyrighted, Commons requires a Free license in order to host that file. In some cases, that may involve licenses from more than one individual.

Determining from whom we need a license

In a nutshell: we need a license from each party that holds a copyright relevant to some aspect of the work. There may be more than one such party for a single work.

As mentioned above, for any given file, Commons is concerned with the copyright laws in its "home country" and in the United States. (For files from the United States and its overseas territories, there is no separate "home country", and only U.S. laws apply.) We need a license if relevant content is copyrighted in the U.S. or in the home country.

Usually the copyright for a given work belongs to the author of the work for their lifetime, and then passes as part of their estate to a specific individual or entity either designated explicitly as heir to their intellectual property or inheriting that as part of the residuum of their estate. Many countries also allow some other means of transferring copyright. The two most common are:

• Transfer of copyright to an employer for works created as part of your job.
• Transfer of copyright by written conveyance.

Some countries also allow (or have allowed in the past) transfer of copyright when a photograph is taken for a fee, such as a professional photographer with a studio taking family photos. Unfortunately, this is often very difficult to document. Similarly, if all we know is that something is a "family photo" and different members of the family have different heirs, it can be very difficult to know who currently owns the copyright.

Some content involves multiple copyrights. Each of these copyrights could be held by a separate person or organization, and if the material is copyrighted we would licenses from each. We strongly advise that you have quite a bit of experience before even attempting to deal with cases involving multiple copyright-holders other than yourself. For example:

• A recording of a musical performance would involve separate copyrights from the composer, performer, and (if there were creative acts performed in post-processing) possibly a sound engineer.
• Someone in France takes a picture of a building built in the 1990s. France does not recognize freedom of panorama at all, so to license this image, we would need licenses both from the photographer and from the architect of the building.
• Someone in the U.S. takes a picture of a sculpture. The U.S. does not recognize freedom of panorama for sculptures, so to license this image, we would need licenses both from the photographer and from the sculptor.
• Someone in one of the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) takes a portrait photo of a person, with a copyrighted painting prominently in the background. None of these countries recognize freedom of panorama for paintings, so to license this image, we would need licenses both from the photographer and from the painter. (Alternatively, the painting could be cropped out, or covered with a strong Gaussian blur.)
• Someone makes a composite image. All of the copyrights of images used would be relevant, as would that of the person who composed them.
• Some files (especially things like PDFs with many photos by different photographers) may raise difficult—even insurmountable—issues because so many copyright-holders are involved.

• 
  Using a strong Gaussian blur to cover a copyrighted image for which we lack a license.
• 
  Composite of two photos showing the same hall more than a century apart.
• 
  The logos on the cap and T-shirt here are de minimis.
• 
  Commons has concluded that in a country (in this case Georgia) with no freedom of panorama, the inclusion of copyrighted buildings in a broad cityscape image like this is de minimis.

Incidental inclusion (de minimis inclusion) of a copyrighted work within a larger work does not normally require getting a license for the incidentally included work. For example, consider:

• a photograph of someone with a copyrighted logo on their T-shirt; unless that logo were a prominent feature of the photograph, for our purposes we could ignore the copyright status of that logo.
• a photograph of a city skyline in a country with no freedom of panorama. If no particular building was prominently featured, we could probably ignore the copyright status of any given building.

Note that, despite these images being OK for Commons, we would not accept cropping the image to emphasize the offending element. For example, we would not allow you to crop the image of Batumi, Georgia above to emphasize one particular copyrighted building without getting a free license from the architect.

Occasionally the "home country" of a work can be difficult to determine. Again, some rules of thumb:

• In terms of freedom of panorama, we usually defer to the laws of the country depicted.
• If a photo is taken across a border, from one country into another country, either country may legitimately be taken as the home country (but not one for some aspects of the law, and the other for others). You can opt for the country with more liberal copryight laws.
• For a visual work that first appeared in a print publication, for most purposes other than freedom of panorama, the country of publication wins out over the country depicted or the country of which the photographer is/was a citizen.
  • When a work was first published simultaneously in multiple countries, it is our prerogative which country to consider the country of publication. For copyright purposes, any publication within 30 days of first publication is considered simultaneous.

Tags for public domain material

Loosely speaking, Commons when people here on Commons talk about "license tags" they also include "PD tags" that explain why particular material is in the public domain). Technically, "PD tags" aren't licenses, they are explanations of why no license is needed.

There are an enormous number of PD tags. Commons prefers that you use the most precise PD tag applicable to a given file. There can be a bit of a learning curve involved in this, but all such tags should be in the hierarchy under Category:PD license tags, and on the whole the subcategory names should be self-explanatory, even if some of the names of individual tags are a bit less so. If you know something is in the public domain but cannot work out exactly how best to tag it, upload it with your best guess, then come to Commons:Village pump/Copyright, better known as VP/C to ask for further help.

For genuinely old works, some the most useful tags are

• {{PD-old-auto-expired|YEAR}}: work published before 1930, with a known author who died in the specified YEAR (long enough ago to be out of copyright in its home country).
• {{PD-old-100-expired}}: work published long enough ago that we are confident the author has been dead at least a century, even if their exact death date is unknown.

For U.S. federal government works, there is an entire hierarchy of tags under Category:PD-USGov license tags. Please try to use the most specific one you can identify.

What licenses are acceptable?

Main article: Commons:Licensing.
In a nutshell: for copyrighted works, Commons requires a license that:

• is worldwide.
• waives all copyright-based restrictions on who can use the content, including for commercial purposes
• waives all copyright-based restrictions on making and publishing derivative works

Acceptable licenses may require attribution (indication of whose work is being used) and may require that derivative uses make clear which aspects of the derivative work are not the work of the attributed author. Acceptable licenses may require that the same license must be offered for derivative works (a so-called viral license).

Only the holder of the copyright can grant a license. Just like you can't give someone permission to use your neighbor's car, Person A cannot grant a license to use something Person B owns! See Commons:license laundering for more detail.

Is the content you want to upload already free-licensed or in the public domain?

Typically, if content is free-licensed or in the public domain, you will know this one of the following ways:

• It is clearly old enough that any copyright has necessarily expired, so it is in the public domain: e.g. an illustration in a book published in 1850; a painting by a medieval monk.
• It is known to be in the public domain because it is simple enough to be ineligible for copyright in the relevant country, or it is a type of thing that cannot be copyrighted in the relevant country (e.g. some countries don't allow coats of arms to be copyrighted; the U.S. doesn't allow work of federal government employees to be copyrighted).
• A reliable source states overtly that the work is in the public domain, has no known copyright restrictions, or indicates an appropriate free license.
  • For online sources, usually you will find any indication of public-domain or free-licensed status in one of three places:
    1. On the same web page. If the page isn't simply about this one media item, then typically any statement about status or licensing will either be very near the relevant content or at the bottom of the web page. On a few sites (e.g. YouTube) this can be a little harder to find. If you have reason to believe something is public-domain or free-licensed, but cannot find evidence yourself, you can bring your question to Commons:Help desk or Commons:Village pump/Copyright.
    2. On some page indicating a site-wide policy. Usually, if that exists you will find that from a link at the top or bottom of the page.
  • Do note that not everything that looks like a license is free enough for Commons. Here are some examples of things that are not free enough, and the list is certainly not exhaustive:
    • Licenses that forbid commercial use. ("Commercial" here does not mean advertising, which is typically restricted by various moral rights, but it does mean things like using something in a book or newspaper for sale, a printed calendar, or a for-profit website.) The best-known such prohibited licenses are the "CC-BY-NC" and "CC-BY-NC-ND" licenses.
    • Licenses that forbid derivatives, and only allow the work to be reproduced intact. The best-known such prohibited licenses are the "CC-BY-ND" and "CC-BY-NC-ND" licenses.
    • Vague statements like "It's OK with me if you reuse this."
    • Statements like "released for press use", "released as a publicity photo", "for news use only", etc.
  • Supposedly reliable sources can make mistakes, so use common sense. If a website claims that a photo that obviously includes a copyrighted work of art "has no known copyright restrictions," and does not address how the work of art was licensed, then they have almost certainly made a mistake.

Content that is already free-licensed or in the public domain

If the content you want to upload already is already in the public domain, or all of its copyrighted elements are free-licensed, then uploading to Commons is almost as simple as uploading your own work.

The most common tool to upload to Commons is Special:UploadWizard. The wizard does a very good job of guiding you through uploading images that are already free-licensed on Flickr, so we won't cover that in the step-by-step guide that follows.

1. Note the source information for the content you are uploading.
   • The most common case is that the file is already online as an individual image. You will typically need:
     • A stable URL of a publicly accessible page showing the image. For example, if it is on Facebook, you would click on the timestamp of the original post to get a Facebook page specific to that post.
     • If there is more than one image at that prior URL, you will typically also want a stable URL of the image itself for clarity.
     • If the statement granting a license is not on that same web page, then you will want a URL for that as well.
   • If you are using another sort of source (e.g. it came from an old book or magazine, or if it is within a PDF)
     • Try to provide source information comparable to what is used for en:Template:Cite book in the English-language Wikipedia. (See File:Elton E. Ainsworth.jpg for an example.)
     • If you are depending on a license, rather than a public domain rationale, and the biliographic information for the license is distinct from that of the photo, keep track of that.
2. One or another way, get the file you are uploading onto your own PC.
3. Navigate to Special:UploadWizard, "drop" the file onto the upload page and click "Continue".
4. Select "This work was created by someone else and it is free to share."
5. As appropriate, click either "The creator has released or published this work under a free license" or "This work is not protected by copyright law"
   • If the appropriate license or PD rationale is listed, select that; otherwise, you may need to track down the relevant license tag for the "Enter a different tag" / "Add a specific public domain tag" field. The hierarchy under may help. If you can't find the right tag, you may need to come to Commons:Help desk for assistance.
6. Indicate where you found the work (the URLs or other bibliographical information from step 1; this is a freeform field, and if you need to say something complicated, you can).
7. Indicate, to the best of your ability the name of the author. If may be that the best you can do is a company, or a website, or "found in a book authored by XX" Do the best you can. In the worst case, there is a box to check for "unknown".
8. Click next.
9. The rest of this works just like uploading something you created yourself. Do be careful to give the most accurate date you can.

Also, remember: this is a wiki. Nothing is "final". Check your file page after uploading; if there is something you need to tweak, do so. The most common thing you will want to change on the file page after uploading licensed (not PD) content from an online source: because the source site might later change its content ("link rot"), we recommend that you request license review: an administrator or trusted license reviewer can verify the current license while the source is still available. For the special Flickr case mentioned above, the UploadWizard requests this automatically, but it does not do this when you upload from your own device, even if you credit an online source. Instead, you have to edit the file page for the newly uploaded file, and add a license review tag. Typically this goes just below the license tag (or PD tag). The most generic license review tag is {{LicenseReview}}, but Category:License review tags contains others that are specific to some particular sources, probably most notably {{YouTubeReview}}.

Other examples of things often worth changing:

• The date input in the UploadWizard is a bit inflexible (it wants a precise date). You can always go back afterward and edit in something like 1897 or {{other date|between|1910-01|1918-06}} or {{circa|1923}}. If you are trying to express a particular statement about date, author, etc. and don't know how, ask at Commons:Help desk: indicate what you want it to mean, and someone will be able to tell you how best to express that using wikitext and existing templates.
• For authors of encyclopedic notability, we often have a "Creator" template that provides more information than just the person's name as author. For example, if you were uploading a photo by Norwegian photographer Anders Beer Wilse, it is best to credit him as {{Creator:Anders Beer Wilse}}, which displays in the "Author" field of {{Information}} as:

Anders Beer Wilse  (1865–1949)
	Description	Norwegian photographer father of Robert Charles Wilse
	Date of birth/death	12 June 1865	21 February 1949
	Location of birth/death	Flekkefjord Municipality	Oslo
	Work period	1900–49
	Work location	Kristiania (Oslo), Kragerø, Seattle
	Authority file	: Q144339 VIAF: 11872032 ISNI: 0000000037452319 LCCN: no92001066 Open Library: OL465293A GND: 1061736962 BIBSYS: 90105880 KulturNav: 2b94216b-f2fc-46a3-b2ce-eeb93aa19185 RKD: 402220 J9U: 987007281146405171 WorldCat

creator QS:P170,Q144339

The user can click on that little arrow on the top line to expand this and see more information about this creator.

If you need to obtain a license for copyrighted work

Now you've reached the tough part. You want to put content on Commons, and someone else owns the copyright, and they haven't granted a license.

What not to do

First, here's what not to do: don't write to someone and say, "Hey, can we use this on Wikipedia" or "Can we use this on Commons", etc. Permission to use the file on Wikipedia or Commons is not enough. It does not constitute a free license. If you make this "wrong ask" first, all you are doing is making it harder for you or anyone else to go back and ask the right question.

Determine who is the copyright-holder

For some content it is reasonably easy to see who owns the copyright, though there are always a few possible pitfalls. It may be stated explicitly (although there is always the problem of possible Commons:License laundering, so beware unlikely claims), or it may be obvious from context (someone's Facebook post with a picture of the concert they saw last night). Sometimes, though, it takes some correspondence or some detective work: you may need to use reverse image search to trace the image back to it origin, or you may need to contact the subject of a photo to ask who took the photo.

If you are having trouble working out who would own the relevant copyright(s) for particular content, the best place to ask is Commons:Village pump/Copyright. Please be as specific as you can be with your question. It is often useful to give both the URL of the content itself and the URL of the page you found it on.

Help them choose a license

The copyright-holder will need to grant a specific license. It is up to you to decide whether it is simpler when contacting them to give them multiple options or to ask for one license in particular.

If the copyright-holder already licenses some of their content under some appropriate free license, or if you know that some license will be convenient for them, it is a lot easier to ask them to grant that license than a different one. For example, Flickr has good support for users to offer {{CC-BY 2.0}} and {{CC-BY-SA 2.0}}, both of which are free enough for Commons. If you are asking a Flickr user to license a photo, it is a lot easier to ask them to make it CC-BY 2.0 than CC-BY 2.0. All they have to do is go to the relevant file page and make a couple of clicks. COM:VRT#When contacting VRT is unnecessary links to pages describing the best ways to do this on many sites that are common sources.

Otherwise, as of 2025 our preferred licenses are:

• {{CC-BY-SA 4.0}} - this is the most restrictive license accepted by Commons. It requires that re-users attribute the work when reusing it; that derivative works make it clear what they have changed; and that derivative works are similarly licensed.
• {{CC-BY 4.0}} - the same, except that derivative works do not have to be similarly licensed.
• {{CC-zero}} - this amounts to releasing your work into the public domain. This is a much more difficult ask. It means reusers will not have to attribute. It basically lets go of all control of what happens to the work in the future.

How they can grant a license

If it is clear who would own the copyright, and if they maintain a public-facing web presence (a website of their own; a public-facing social media account; etc.) then often the simplest thing for them to do is to indicate the license overtly on their own website or in a publicly visible social media post. That can be as simple as adding the same sort of notice discussed above that you presumably looked for and didn't find. Once that is added, you (or any Commons user) can then proceed with a normal upload to Commons, citing this source in a normal way.

On the other hand, things get trickier if it is less clear who owns the copyright, or if it is not convenient for them to indicate the license online.

Copyright ownership might be unclear because:

• The work in question was published under a pseudonym and it is not obvious what real-world individual owns the rights
• The work in question is already published in multiple places, and not clearly attributed.
• The copyright has been transferred.
• The work contains several elements that are not obviously by a single person.
• You found (for example) a photo as part of the web presence of the subject of the photo, or found an artwork on a gallery site, and it is likely that someone else (the photographer, the artist) owns the copyright.

At this point we need the copyright-owner to go through the "VRT" process: carrying on a confidential email correspondence with the Volunteer Response team, who are designated to handle confidential correspondence for Commons. This is laid out at COM:VRT, and there is no substitute for reading that page. However, the key steps are:

1) Get their basic agreement to do this:

• Identify the owner of the copyright. This may require some legwork and correspondence on your part.
• Contact the owner of the copyright to ask if they would be willing to release the work under a particular free license. You might find it useful at this time to include a draft of the email you would like them to send to VRT, or you might want to go more slowly. en:Wikipedia:Example requests for permission (on the English-language Wikipedia) has some examples of letters to request permission, or you can ask for help at Commons:WikiProject Permission requests.
• Keep in mind: there are plenty of good reasons for people not to want to free-license their work. The leading reasons would be:
  • Their intellectual property is how they make their living. Almost no one is going to pay a photographer, graphic artist, composer, etc. for something they can use under a free license.
  • They simply prefer to keep tight control of their intellectual property.

If they say no, please be polite about this, it is entirely their prerogative.

2) The copyright-holder—not the Wikimedian involved—needs to send email to VRT to grant or confirm the license. The COM:VRT page contains a sample of the email they would need to send, and also links to a generator to make it easier to generate the text of such an email. The email should also contain copies of the correspondence with you that got things this far. A few key details:

• It is generally best practice for them to CC you on the email, though this is not required, and it is sometimes wise of them to do otherwise where confidentiality might be an issue.
• They need to be clear about what material this covers.
• They need to be clear about what license they are offering
• Things tend to be much simpler if they send email from an email address and/or domain that readily confirms they are who they say they are (e.g. a published contact email, or one from within the domain of an organization that owns a copyright).
• If the copyright has been transferred, they will need to explain that.
• They should expect that there may need to be a few emails back-and-forth for clarification. If they do not reply, the process will typically fail.

3) There is no specific requirement about when you upload the file. Usually it is simplest to upload it before the copyright-holder sends email, so they can reference the URL of the uploaded file to explain what content they are talking about. If you do that, make sure:

• When you upload, indicate the correct license and use Template:PP (instructions are on that template page) to indicate that permission is pending.
• Please try to make sure that they send the permission promptly. Files that sit too long in the pending state will be deleted, though they can be undeleted if and when permission finally arrives.

>>> Need step-by-step here with Special:UploadWizard. Need to cover attributing author and date, citing source, anything else that would differ from uploading your own work. Should cover both using a "standard" license (known to the wizard) and handling a situation where you need to explicitly pick a different tag.

When the VRT process completes successfully, they will remove the indication that permission is pending, and replace it with a {{PermissionTicket}}