[Mediawiki-l] Moving images to another wiki, preserving all names?

[Daniel Barrett]

What is the current best practice for moving all images from one wiki "A" into a second, ACTIVE wiki "B"?  Requirements are:

1.      Detect any image naming collisions between the two wikis, and resolve them before import
2.      Transfer all "File:..." pages from wiki "A" into wiki "B", including their revision history
3.      Transfer all images from wiki "A" into wiki "B", including all old versions

Is /maintenance/importImages.php is the right tool?  I could imagine finding all images in the /images folder and feeding them to importImages.php.  Will that work together with importing all "File:..." pages from wiki "A" into wiki "B" via /maintenance/importDump.php?  (It won't import all revisions of each image however....)

Or could we simply copy the /images folder from the first wiki to the second (using ordinary filesystem copy operations), and then use /maintenance/importDump.php to import the entire "File:" namespace from the first wiki into the second?  Do all the hashed image file paths get preserved and continue to work?

Or is there a better method?  Remember that wiki "B" is active and not a new, empty wiki.

Thanks,
DanB