User blog comment:Kirkburn/How images are picked to represent articles/@comment-4772526-20130626172444/@comment-126761-20130627141443

It would need to be 10 different pages, unfortunately - I realise that's not ideal. We could reduce the re-use limit down from 10 on that wiki, but that has a risk of causing other pages to stop having images chosen - and of course if the maintenance template is still only used one or twice at a time, it still wouldn't solve it.

Of course, I can hardly complain that you need the maintenance templates so little - that's actually rather great to hear, even if it causes problems for ImageServing.

I'll pass on Leviathan's idea about making it so you can exclude specific images - I think it could help as a solution for this.

For the images that are used in userpage boxes, I think a simple solution is to simply use a separate copy of the image for the userboxes - that way they don't count against the article's version.