In which way exactly would such data removal benefit them, could you elaborate? Because I completely fail to see how removing information can benefit anyone, beside making download (insignificantly in this case) smaller.
I can see exactly two situations:
- data consumer is able to parse to more complex image (indirect image linking) e.g. by opening
image link in browser where user can see the image. In that case, your proposed automated edit would make situation worse for data consumer, by taking useful information away from them
- data consumer is unable to parse more complex image (i.e. it can only display directly-linked images). In this case, it would obviously not display the image to the user – which would be exactly the same result/usefulness to data consumer as if you did that proposed automated edit and removed the
image tag. Thus, data consumers wouldn’t benefit.
Thus, doing such proposed automated edit will make situation worse for some data consumers, while making no difference for other data consumers. It won’t make situation better in either case. Thus, it’s impact can only be negative, never positive. As such, it sounds like a bad idea.
No, I would not, as I don’t see how it would make situation better (even if the proponent commited to do PR implementing support for new tag for top-25 data consumers, result would still be worse, or at best equally good/bad, than a current situation)
I don’t think why you think it’s impossible? It’s possible as with the others (e.g. wikimedia, wikipedia, mapillary…).
E.g. that google.com/maps example from your overpass that I’ve linked earlier ? You can get direct Content-Type: image/jpeg of that storefront picture, like this.
It’s not even especially hard. Main problem however is that such deep-linking loses context. As when you link directly to .jpg on wikimedia commons, you lose all metadata as opposed when you link to File: on wikimedia commons. And if the link was to Category (like this google maps example is), you loose all but a first picture. (another problem is that those might get blocked at some time in the future)
So, it would seem to that your proposed automated edit seems to stem from the fact that you don’t like how image=* wiki is defined, and you’d like if it was simpler. Am I correct?
Well, it is what it is, and it is little late to change how it is supposed to be used, and trying to enforce that imagined simplicity that would break on much more than just google maps links is not a good idea, IMHO (and trying to subjectively enforce rules in one case, and not in others cases, I find even more disturbing idea). Let’s not go there.
If you have a dream of such simplicity, you might want to propose new tag like image_direct which would have simpler syntax that is different than the one specified by image=*, but I’d also consider that waste of time and effort (it would require more work all around, while not accomplish anything that isn’t already possible with much less work)
TL;DR: it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.
What might a be good idea instead, if you’re feeling up to it, is to go (and encourage other people going) visit those locations, and upload your own (better!) pictures to wikimedia commons, and then replacing that image=https://maps.google.... with wikimedia_commons=File: (or wikimedia_commons=Category:). That would replace unwanted google copyright-restricted stuff with free wikimedia commons stuff, and at the same time clear that parsing complexity from those image=* tags (well, it would move complexity to wikimedia_commons=* tag, but it is always expected there)
