[Wiki] Store directly uploaded images into a dedicated directory.

[Andre601]

Context

I recently saw the blog post about the change, that images can now be uploaded to wikis directly.

While I welcome this change, do I feel like that the way of how the images are saved could be changed, to utilize the wiki more effectively.

Currently, when uploading an image, is the resulting URL often something alongside this example:
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/11576465/153945162-3ca15ae2-af2f-4663-8295-18f99e7f1aa9.png

Suggestion

My suggestion is, to now change this behaviour for wikis, and maybe even repositories in general.
I recall a fact, that certain files (or files in general) got uploaded under a repository's dedicated folder for those, when they got uploaded to issues or Pull requests (This seems to have changed since?)

The new behaviour would upload the image or file itself directly to an _assets folder in the wiki on its default branch and return the raw.githubusercontent.com URL for it.

As an example, uploading an image called Example.png on a wiki for ExampleUser/ExampleRepo would give back the following URL (Assuming default branch is main):

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ExampleUser/ExampleRepo.wiki/main/_assets/Example.png

Possible questions and answers

Why would this be useful?
It would allow maintainers to have a more easy way to update images in the wiki.
While you can just upload the new image and update the URLs, can this be tedious, if the same image is used in multiple locations on the wiki.

With this setup could you clone the wiki locally to your desktop, update the image under the _assets folder and push the changes back.
That way can the URL stay the same and maintenance work is minimal.

What if a file with that name already exists?
The file would get a number attached to its name, similar to how many OS do that already when downloading files with the same name.

This means that Example.png would become Example-1.png

What if the _assets folder already exists?
While unlikely since the wiki is often not used outside of storing Markdown files, is there the possibility for this.
In such a case would GitHub just work as if it existed before and upload the files to it, while following the previous question about duplicate names.

Aren't there any alternatives?
Currently, available alternatives would be:

• Self-host it yourself under a website domain.
• Host it on the parent repository itself.
• Use an image host like imgur or similar.

All of them have their benefits and drawbacks.

Selfhosting would allow freedom of how the image is named and how the URL should look like, but requires a VPS (Or alternatively GitHub Pages, Vercel, Netlify, ...) and/or some knowledge about maintaining all this.

Parent repository is nice, but it could feel out of place if the repository isn't really image-focused or similar.

Image hosts like Imgur usually change their URLs for the image for each upload, requiring you to update the URL anyway, which wouldn't be different to a directly upload now.

[MohamedAdilN]

How can I access this _assets file in my Appwiki?

[Andre601]

Please read the post properly. This is NOT a feature in the wiki.