I’m curious as to whether this is a problem your visitors have raised with you or something you’ve noticed yourself as a developer? Most sites these days will have very random looking image names that can also look like a series (I checked Twitter, Facebook, BBC News, The Guardian quickly, all of them have random image names or images that look like a series).
If you’re replacing an image it’s important that the name changes in order to ensure that caches update - Ghost by default adds 1-year expiry headers to images so a straight swap wouldn’t necessarily cause visitor’s browsers, CDNs, other caches etc to update.
Would you be happier with random image names? That would likely need to happen in the future anyway once automatic compression and image resizing is in place (see the Automatic thumbnailing/resizing of image uploads Ideas topic)
As a visitor, when right clicking and opening an image directly in a new tab, the year that the image was uploaded appears in the URL. The image was uploaded in 2018, but the post that contains the image is dated 2002. As a user, I am confused that this years is in the URL rather than the year of the post.
Again, I’m curious to hear if this is a complaint your visitors have raised or something you’ve noticed as a developer. It’s the first time I’ve heard about this being a problem.
It’s also worth noting that both of the above issues can be resolved right now if they are real problems on your site by using a custom storage adapter set to match your site’s requirements