How to Cite Images

Question

What is the recommended way of citing images? Have a look at this rather good answer - Kevin cites the image directly in the textual (as rendered) portion of the body, where I am more likely to do the following (keeping the citation out of the body; but still available for those who need it):

![Perspective View Frustum - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3aPerspective_view_frustum.png][1]

Alternatively you could do it this way:

![http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perspective_view_frustum.png][1]

[1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/kOCLV.png "Perspective View Frustum"

This ensures that the tooltip is meaningful (title attribute), however the alt gets abused and this could cause serious issues for disabled users - doing it the other way messes up the tooltip - so nobody wins. Finally you could use a hyperlink:

[![Perspective View Frustum][1]][2]

[1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/kOCLV.png "Perspective View Frustum"
[2]: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perspective_view_frustum.png "Original Source"

The main disadvantage here is that is really ugly markdown - which goes against the grain of why markdown was conceived in the first place; furthermore you lose the ability to create an actual hyperlinked image.

Which is the preferred method? Should we maybe add image citation to the markdown? Something along the lines of (which renders to something along the lines of my last option, or some HTML5 goodness):

![Perspective View Frustum][1]

[1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/kOCLV.png "Perspective View Frustum" [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perspective_view_frustum.png]

This means that the image dialog would need to insert the cited source, when using images from the web. Currently the 'From Web' in the image window clones the image to stack.imgur.com; so the markdown-style citation points to imgur - thereby losing the original location. This would need to be changed to emit the markdown for whichever citation method is chosen.

The only reason I am bringing this up is because game developers are notoriously vigilant about correct citing.

Answer 1

I believe this is the best method using existing Markdown support:

[![Perspective View Frustum][1]][2]

[1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/kOCLV.png "Perspective View Frustum"
[2]: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perspective_view_frustum.png "Original Source"

Alternately:

![Perspective View Frustum][1]
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perspective_view_frustum.png

[1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/kOCLV.png "Perspective View Frustum"

... provide the bare link next to the image; why not just Keep It Simple?

Either way is fine. I don't see a need to add additional syntax when the existing syntax works OK for this.