Set up infrastructure to store instrument images

[dchiller]

There's an old discussion at #15 about where to do this. A decision should be made and then this should be implemented.

[fujinaga]

I like the Wikimedia route. What do @dchiller and @ahankinson think?

[ahankinson]

If you want the work on VIM/UMIL to live past the end of the LinkedMusic project, I think uploading it to a shared place like Wikimedia is a good option.

It will be awkward to allow both local uploads and external uploads, though. For one, thumbnail derivatives (#108) are not really possible locally. I believe Wikimedia creates derivative sizes, though, so you could use those. (See the "sizes" at the bottom of this photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Saxophone.jpg

Wikimedia also does not really like TIFF or some other image types (#53) and recommend that you convert them manually before uploading. See: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:File_types#TIFF.

You can upload to Wikimedia via an API, so you could offer image upload in your own application and then transfer it to Wikimedia, but you'll probably need an account to do that.

[dchiller]

The one real downside I can see to Wikimedia is that anyone can delete/change anything there, so we are either:
(a) uploading to Wikimedia AND keeping a copy somewhere that we run UMIL off of
(b) just uploading to Wikimedia but doing maintenance for links that go dead, potentially losing the images people upload, etc.

(a) make more sense to me, I think

It will be awkward to allow both local uploads and external uploads, though.

Not sure what you mean by this? Local uploads is people uploading from their phone or desktop? External uploads is people giving a link? Do we want to/need to allow external uploads in this case?

Wikimedia also does not really like TIFF or some other image types (#53) and recommend that you convert them manually before uploading. See: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:File_types#TIFF.

This is fine.

[ahankinson]

The deletion policy for Wikimedia Commons is here:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_policy

It's probably good to review this anyway, because they flag some important issues like copyright and identifiable people.

If everything is OK, then there is actually a deletion process, and you can watch a page for anyone triggering a deletion process.

When the UMIL website goes offline in a few years (after the LinkedMusic project is done) then it won't matter if the file gets deleted, I guess? (Another reason to link the images to a Wikidata entry as soon as possible.)

[dchiller]

If everything is OK, then there is actually a deletion process, and you can watch a page for anyone triggering a deletion process.

Or a move, rename, or other change. I guess it's a wiki so all of these are recorded (and in some cases proposed and then approved later). They also cite "vandalism" in their recommendation against linking directly, but I'm not sure what this means.

When the UMIL website goes offline in a few years (after the LinkedMusic project is done) then it won't matter if the file gets deleted, I guess? (Another reason to link the images to a Wikidata entry as soon as possible.)

Indeed.

[ahankinson]

I think vandalism means replacing the image with porn or spam. I would think they would have safeguards against that, but I guess there's always "approved vandalism" -- every image on wikimedia commons gets updated with an appeal from Jimmy Wales for $$$. But that's a long shot.