Manual of Style: Image and Media File Naming Scheme

The names of images and all other files uploaded to Zendiwiki should conform to the following recommendations.

Follow the same naming conventions for images and media as you would for other files, wiki pages and wiki namespaces themselves:

Avoid the spaces and use hyphens. You should also not use underscores. Stick to the lower case Latin letters from “a” to “z” and the digits “0” to “9”. (See also naming conventions.)

The title should briefly and succinctly outline the content. In other words: Combine essential keywords to build the image name.

If some pictures belong together thematically, you can use a special, understandable and meaningful keyword repeatedly for all these pictures at the beginning of the name. Think of this keyword as a kind of “tagging”.

In contrast, you can also use a cryptic marker at the very beginning of the name to make a classification. This would also make the images appear in a sorted list in a row.

These approaches can be combined.

Examples:

flowers-roses-on-international-garden-exhibition-berlin-2022.png, flowers-enzian-snowy-mountaintop.png

Here “flowers” is used like a tag or category.

mbh1-file-upload-dialogue.png, mbh1-adding-new-file-type.png . The cryptic tag “mbh1” ,for example, marks all images used in the wiki page “Moodle basics handout part 1”.

The “meaning” (if any) of such a “cryptic tag” need not be known to the reader. Such a mark should of course be as short as possible and should be unique among all media files.

The application of such tags can be useful because a media folder contains the images for all wiki pages of the same namespace. (see under Image upload location).

When naming image files, just as with all other visible naming of elements in the wiki, all legal requirements must be met. Always critical, for example, is the use of product, company and brand names. Of course, a correct file name cannot “cure” illegal image content.