Style of typesetting images in questions/answers

Question

With image support via imgur.com being almost one year old, the content in both questions and answers have surely been enriched. My introduction to posting images, like with so many new users, came with my first visit, subsequent registration and post to TeX.SX, only to be greeted with the insufficient privileges disclaimer for new users that doesn't allow image posting.

Since being able to post images and also through editing other's questions/answers, I've noticed a difference in style:

• Inserting images as-you-type hyperlink format:

![<enter image description here>](<image url>)

• Inserting images using the imgur.com GUI click-to-insert button , which leaves you with:

![<enter image description here>][<imgtag>]

[<imgtag>]: <image url>

Since I would like to keep things organised, properly name the image to be upload and revert to the former option by copying the image hyperlink next to the markdown and removing the <imgtag> - thereby keeping the image placement together with the image link. I even give a description of the image.

My questions are:

1. Which of the above usages would be considered best practice on TeX.SX?
2. What is the use of changing <enter image description here> if it is never visible to the non-editing users; not even via a tooltip text?
3. Is there any advantage in giving a meaningful name to an image that is uploaded to imgur.com?

The motivations behind these questions are:

1. Don't know whether this is sheer user preference, since organisation of a post (and the objects contained within) is subjective. That is, what I find organised may be considered unorganised by others; in true (La)TeX fashion, leaving all the actual images as "references" at the end of a post is just as organised as the other option.
2. I thought translating the meaningful description into a tooltip text would be... well, meaningful. I understand though that not many people find this "editorial description of images" interest or of-value, and therefore decide to leave this blank.

3. If someone is interested in downloading an image that was posted (for whatever reason), the downloaded image has imgur.com's "short url". For example, the button image hyperlink in this post is

   https://i.stack.imgur.com/6YO9r.png

Answer 1

1. It doesn't matter, as long as you upload the image via the SE upload interface (this uploads them to a special SE account that prevents them from getting deleted). I usually just leave it the way it is, because I'm too lazy to rewrite it. But if you prefer to use the other syntax, nobody will stop you from using it.
2. This text is used in the alt property of the HTML <img> tag. The idea of that is that this text will be displayed instead of the image whenever the browser can't display the image. For example when imgur.com is offline, when the user has disabled images or on a slow internet connection before the image has been loaded. Accessibility guidelines usually state that all images must have an alt text. (Browers used to display that text as a tooltip, but I think most modern browsers have stopped doing that.)
3. As you noticed, imgur automatically renames the files to some unique (but nonsensical) name. I think there is no way of getting the original file name from imgur. So it doesn't matter how the file is named before you upload it.