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Rolf Lampa wrote:

What's the status for the idea to adapt the MW platform for using media from Commons in ("live") image links?

I recall an idea being discussed earlier was to cache pictures on the calling MW site after the first fetch from Commons. The idea was to try to avoid wasting bandwidth by providing a means for external sites to not having to repeatedly retrieving the same picture several times.

What's the current status of this idea? Or is it already possible (and allowed) to retrieve images from Commons via "live links"?

The experimental ForeignAPIRepo in MediaWiki 1.13 can do this. It's not super-efficient right now as it may make a lot more API calls to Commons than one likes, but is suitable at least for testing. :)

There's some experimental code for doing more aggressive caching, including caching of actual thumbnails, which may be in the dev trunk (for 1.14).

The older background info on this idea is at: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/InstantCommons but the actual current implementation is separate.

- -- brion