Since 2006, Wikimedia Commons has held an annual competition that ‘aims to identify the best freely licensed images from those that during the year have been awarded Featured picture status’.
Any Wikimedia Commons user that registered before January 1, 2016 is eligible to vote. Round 1 includes all images promoted to featured picture status in 2015. Round 2 includes the top 30 images from Round 1. The top image will be declared as the Picture of the Year. The next two will be featured as runners-up and another nine will be recognized as picture of the year finalists.
To see all previous Picture of the Year winners, click here.
 
 

Picture of the Year

Photograph by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute  
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft captured this high-resolution enhanced color view of Pluto on July 14, 2015. The image combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC). Pluto?s surface sports a remarkable range of subtle colors, enhanced in this view to a rainbow of pale blues, yellows, oranges, and deep reds. Many landforms have their own distinct colors, telling a complex geological and climatological story that scientists have only just begun to decode. The image resolves details and colors on scales as small as 0.8 miles (1.3 kilometers). The viewer is encouraged to zoom in on the image on a larger screen to fully appreciate the ...