Restrict wikimedia_commons URLs as image=* tag values?

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

@amadvance

Wikimedia Commons discourages hot linking, so the widely accepted best practice is to link to the description page (the one you call as “HTML page”).

If so, this key has been misused tens of thousands of times. That should be cleaned up before consolidating another key into it.

@amadvance

Data consumers such as OsmAnd can typically handle this page. This process is no more complex than handling the wikimedia_commons tag, and it doesn’t provide a direct link to the image. In fact, the information conveyed is exactly the same.

Are you referring to OsmAnd’s “Images nearby” panel? That isn’t coming from image tags on features in OSM. For example, this spaceship hangar is tagged with image=http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Last_Look_at_Hangar_One.jpg to indicate what it looks like today (note insecure URL):

File:Last Look at Hangar One.jpg

But OsmAnd shows this historical image instead, based on the linked Wikidata item:

File:Hangar One at Moffett Field 1963.jpg

This robotic company’s office has no wikidata tag, but it does have image = https://www.inorbit.ai/hubfs/Jackal%20on%20the%20street%2001.jpg:

Yet no image appears on OsmAnd:

In order for an application to present an image in the UI using OSM tags, it would need to isolate the file name or manipulate the URL to use Special:Redirect to get the raw image and quite possibly the attribution string. By contrast, the wikimedia_commons key contains a page name that can be used verbatim with the Wikimedia Commons API. If we don’t see this as an advantage, then I don’t really see the advantage of image over description or url.

Additionally, editors such as iD and Go Map!! have fancy preset fields that let you pick a file to add to wikimedia_commons. This makes the process less error-prone for mappers too. image has no such convenience because its format is more freeform.