Irish round of World’s biggest photo competition Wiki Loves Monuments won by photo of Custom House

A photo of the Custom House in Dublin has won this year’s Irish round of the world’s biggest photography competition, Wiki Loves Monuments.

The competition also awarded a special prize for the best photo of a 1916 monument to a photo of Clarke Station in County Louth.

The 2016 Wiki Loves Monuments photography competition took place during September 2016. Initiated by Wikimedia, the movement behind free encyclopaedia Wikipedia, and run in Ireland by the Wikimedia Ireland Community, the competition aims to raise awareness of Ireland’s national monuments and create a crowd-sourced bank of quality photos that will be free to use for education.

The following were the winners of the Wiki Loves Monuments competition:

1. Custom House, Co. Dublin by Filip Scridon

2. Rock of Dunamase, Co. Laois by Celticclog65

3. Hook Head Lighthouse, Co. Wexford by Kay Caplice

4. Dromiskin Church, Co. Louth by DarranRaff

5. Bunratty Castle, Co. Clare by Aidanryan

6. Poulnabrone Portal Tomb, Co. Clare by Ronagh Keane

7. Kylemore Abbey, Co. Galway by Knocko

8. Rockfleet Castle, Co. Mayo by Mikeoem

9. Blennerville Windmill, Co. Kerry by Boodle2000

10. Skerries Windmill, Co. Dublin by Mark Broderick

The winners of the special Wiki Loves Monuments 1916 competition were:

Joint 1st place:
Clarke Station, Co. Louth by Mariamarselina
Pearse’s Cottage, Co Galway by Ray4mondo
Third place:
Kilmainham Gaol, Co. Dublin by Deborahmoynihan
Kilmainham Gaol, Co. Dublin by Colin

The winning Wiki Loves Monuments photos can be viewed here and the winning 1916 photos can be viewed here.

The awards will be made on Tuesday 22nd November at 7pm in The Liquor Rooms, Wellington Quay, Dublin 2. All of the winning images will be on display.

Amateur and professional photographers were invited to photograph the national monuments in their locality and upload their photos to www.wikilovesmonuments.ie. The site includes a listing of each county’s eligible national monuments. Entries were judged by an expert panel. The top ten Irish images are being entered into the international competition.

Certified by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest photography contest, the annual contest started in the Netherlands in 2010 which resulted in over 12,500 images uploaded. Since then it has grown significantly and in 2014 over 321,000 photographs were submitted by more than 9,000 participants from around the world. All images are uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia’s online repository that makes public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) available to everyone.

Rebecca O’Neill, Wikimedia Ireland commented, “We were delighted at the quality of entries into this year’s Irish Wiki Loves Monuments competition. Every year we’ve run the competition since it started in 2014 has seen the range and quality of images improves. These are greatly adding to the existing database of freely accessible images of national monuments.”