Choose a location. The location for your scavenger hunt can be as specific as an art museum or as big as an entire country. Once you have decided on a location, figure out a good meeting place where everyone can get together at the end of the event. Make sure the place you choose has free internet access avaiable. If your location is geographically broad, you may want to have everyone meet at a virtual location, such as an online chat room, rather than in person.

Choose a date. Wikimedia Photo Scavenger Hunts are single day events. Choose a date that will be convenient for as many people as possible (holidays and weekends are best). Have a back-up date in mind in case the weather turns bad.

Compile a list of targets. Go through the Wikipedia categories related to your scavenger hunt location and find articles that are missing photos or need better quality photos. You should also include targets which do not yet have Wikipedia articles, but are likely to in the future. You may also want to solicit fellow Wikipedians for suggestions.

Create the event. To set up your scavenger hunt on this site, you'll need to get an admin username and password. The best way to do this is to contact either Kaldari or Pharos, either on their talk pages or by email. Once you have a username and password, log into the Event Administration interface and click "Create a new scavenger hunt event". Follow the directions from there.

Publicize it. There are numerous ways to get the word out about your scavenger hunt:

• Create a Geonotice request to inform Wikimedians in the area.
• Create a Facebook or MySpace event and invite your friends.
• Contact local photography clubs and the photography departments of local colleges.
• Post a notice on the Community Bulletin Board or Village Pump of your native Wikipedia.
• Post notices on the talk pages of any relavent WikiProjects.

Create instruction packets. If you're planning to have everyone meet at a central location for the start of the event, it will be helpful to have printed instruction packets that you can hand out to the participating teams. Each packet should include the instructions for the event as well as a list of all the targets. Some suggested guidelines can be found here. Be sure to remind each team to take reference photos of each target, in addition to the regular photos for use on Wikipedia. Reference photos typically include an index card in the frame with the name of the target written on it. You may want to bring extra packets of index cards and markers for teams that don't bring their own.

Have the teams upload their photos. Once the hunt is concluded, and the teams have arrived for the after-party, ask the teams that have laptops to visit this site and upload their photos. Bring your own laptop if you can so that you can upload photos for any teams that can't do it themselves. Each team will also need to sort their photos once they are uploaded, that is, identify which target each photo is of. This is when the reference photos will come in handy.

Review and publish. Once all the teams have uploaded and sorted their photos, log into the Event Administration interface. You will then be able to review each teams' submissions and publish them to Wikimedia Commons. The interface will also show you how many points each team earned so that you can announce the winners.

Categorize the photos. After all the photos are published to Commons, ask other Wikimedians to help you categorize them and incorporate them into Wikipedia articles. Some categorization is automatically done during the publishing process, but additional categorization will typically need to be done manually.