Australia has for the first time been included in the Wikimedia Foundation's annual photography competition that seeks images for its online encyclopaedia.

Wiki Loves Monuments is the largest photography competition in the world.

Last year's event led to more than 275,000 images of historic buildings, monuments and cultural heritage sites being added to the Wikimedia Commons library.

All entrants agree to add their images to the library under a creative commons licence, which means they can be freely used and shared by others as long as the photographer is credited.

"It is creating a visual archive," said Gideon Digby, president of Wikimedia Australia.

"Without pictures, people don't realise what they've actually lost and how significant some of those places were."

The competition has been run every September since 2009, but entries from Australia have not been sought until now.

The Melbourne Cricket Ground is one of the sites on Wikimedia's wish list. ( Flickr: Iain Mullan )

"With our heritage sites, the lists and availability of them are such a mess and spread over so many government departments that it has actually taken a lot of work to get a full data set that we can reliably use," Mr Digby said.

There is now a publicly available list of sites that competition organisers hope people will use while snapping.

Places range from remote national parks in the Kimberley to the site of the Wave Hill Walk Off in Kalkarindji, as well as the Bondi Beach post office and the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

Although there was a small chance of winning a cash prize, most people got involved because they loved photography and recording places for posterity, Mr Digby said.

It's not just grand buildings on the list. Small local post offices are also sought for the cultural records. ( Supplied: Steve Powell )

He is a keen landscape photographer and has contributed around 3,500 photographs to the Wikimedia Commons library over the past 12 years.

"I enjoy the challenge of taking photos and Wikipedia offers you a whole broad range of subjects to look at; you can really get into a variety of things from plants to buildings to scenery," he said.

And because users of the library have to attribute him as the photographer, he has been able to track when and where they have been used online.

"My pictures have been used all over the world," he said.

"A photo of the old North Fremantle fuel storage tanks was used in a magazine article in Egypt.

"A photo of the local West Australian Christmas trees ended up in an article about Christmas trees in South America.

"Some of them have been used by local politicians.

"I had Hills Hoist use one of mine for the packaging of one of their clothes line products."

This image of the devil's bridge at Gablenz in Germany was one of last year's finalists. ( Wikimedia: A. Landgraf )

He said he hoped there would be several thousand images of places on the list by the time the competition closed at the end of September.

"We have 135 photos so far," he said.

"Someone from Broken Hill seems to have got every place in Broken Hill. We have stuff from the Bungle Bungles and the Stirling Ranges in Western Australia.

"You get the chance to put your photographs into a collection that will be around for a long time."