Image File Naming in Wiki

[Mark Dexter]

Hi everyone. I'm probably the worst offender in this. It occurs to me
that there is no consistency in the way we (or at least I) name image
files in the wiki. I have posted a lot of screenshots over that past
year and have not been very good about having any consistent naming
convention.

I don't know how images are stored in the back end, but at a minimum
we could start having problems with duplicate names as we continue to
add more images.

Does anyone have any good ideas on this? Are all of the images for the
entire wiki stored in one folder, or are there automatic subfolders?
At a minimum, it seems like we need to make sure names are unique.
Obviously, we don't want to make it difficult to add images.

Anyway, I just wanted to start a discussion on this. Thanks. Mark

[Chris Davenport]

Yes, a good naming convention would be very useful.  Suggestions welcome.

The images are stored in the wiki under the names given to them by whoever uploaded them, but they are spread randomly across multiple directories by a hashing algorithm.  This makes it easier to split the images across multiple physical devices if their number becomes sufficiently large to require such optimisations.

Chris.

2009/1/16 Mark Dexter <dexter...@gmail.com>

[Mark Dexter]

Well, let me ask the question: is there any reason to have descriptive file names? The only reason I can think of is to help the author keep image files straight when the article is being written and images inserted. Beyond that, I can't think of any reason for descriptive names. It is unlikely that an image will be usable by another author or even by the same author in another article.

If that is true, then the main objective would be to minimize the chances of duplicate names. Two possibilities that come to mind are to use the date (for example, "20090116" as part of the name or to use your userid as part of the name. Neither of these is elegant but it would cut down the chance of duplicate names.

So one idea would be to append one of these to a descriptive file name, like "screenshot_page_class_parameter_20090116" or "screenshot_page_class_parameter_dextercowley".  Not very elegant, but perhaps effective.

Hopefully someone has a better idea. Mark

[Chris Davenport]

Hi Mark,

Sorry for the delay in responding to this; workload is getting on top of me.

I see where you're coming from.  I think it is best to keep to reasonably descriptive names if possible.  We can add a date or a sequence number to get uniqueness if we need to.  A systematic naming convention will make it more likely that images will be re-used and maximising resource re-use should be one of our goals.

How about we pre-define a set of "tags" that will form the image name, separated by underscores.  For screenshots I would suggest that this is based on the menu path required to get to the screen where the screenshot was taken.  For example, a screenshot of the Article Manager could include the tags "screenshot", "content" and "article_manager".  So a typical image might be "screen_content_article_manager_full_20090117.png" where I have also included a "full" tag to indicate that it is a full-screen shot and the date so we can ensure a unique filename and at the same time indicate if the image maybe needs updating.  We could, perhaps, also add an "annotated" tag to indicate that some form of annotation has been added, such as an arrow to point out a particular field.

Also note that you can add images to categories in the same way that wiki pages are added to categories (and subcategories).  This would make it even easier to locate an image and increase the chances of its being re-used.  Top-level tags/categories could be:

Tag: screenshot (category: Joomla screenshots)
Tag: eclipse (category: Eclipse screenshots)
Tag: phpmyadmin (category: PhpMyAdmin screenshots)
Tag: diagram (category: Diagrams)
Tag: chart (category: Charts)

Within the "Joomla screenshots" category we could have:
Tag: site (category: Site screenshots)
Tag: menus (category: Menus screenshots)
Tag: content (category: Content screenshots)
Tag: components (category: Component screenshots)
Tag: extensions (category: Extensions screenshots)
Tag: tools (category: Tools screenshots)
Tag: help (category: Help screenshots)
Tag: milky_way (category: Milky Way screenshots)
Tag: beez (category: Beez screenshots)
Tag: ja_purity (category: Ja_purity screenshots)
Tag: installation (category: Installation screenshots)

Then within the "Site screenshots" category we could have:
Tag: control_panel (category: Control panel screenshots)
Tag: user_manager (category: User manager screenshots)
Tag: media_manager (category: Media manager screenshots)
Tag: global_configuration (category: Global configuration screenshots)

And so on.

Some screenshots will be more generic, such as "parameters" so we can just add appropriate tags/categories for those too.

How does that sound?

Chris.

2009/1/17 Mark Dexter <dexter...@gmail.com>

[Mark Dexter]

Hi Chris. That sounds great to me. The timing is good also, since I assume we'll be updating a lot of screenshots with the 1.6 docs. Thanks. Mark