Forum:Card image naming policy

Let me just start off by saying that everyone that works with card images is probably going to hate me for this. Please, though, hold your vitriol for the end.

Currently, our image naming policy is somewhat arbitrary (it's also far too limited in scope, but that's another issue =D ): image names should carry over exclamation points and commas from card names, but pretty much nothing else. This is a problem because now, whenever an editor wants to upload a card image for a card whose name has non-alphanumeric characters, they have to remember: do I remove apostrophes? How about dashes or ampersands?

This is to say nothing of how, for whatever reason, we require a hyphen-minus between everything except the card's name and the set/medium the image is from - another point of inconsistency, and it means templates cannot (at least not easily or trivially, and in the vast majority of cases simply cannot) automatically determine the set/medium an image is from by just using the image name.

So, my proposal is twofold: This means that we will have to rename every single card image currently uploaded, but as I said the last time I proposed updating our image policy in this manner, it would not be something we'd have to complete overnight, and we already have one template (with more planned) that can be used to automatically tag images that need to be renamed, reducing the entire operation to a single click on an admin's part, once the template has been added.
 * 1) card image names should exclude all characters from the card name except for alphanumeric characters (we would still want alphanumeric characters with accents, ligatures, and the like, in the rare cases they are used), and
 * 2) every part of the image name (ignoring the image extension, of course) should be separated by a hyphen-minus.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Vitriol? =D 「 ディノ 奴 千？！ 」? · ☎ Dinoguy1000 05:31, October 20, 2011 (UTC)