Photo Album and Photo Integration?
Hi Guys,
As might be expected, I have a question about suitability of drupal for my needs.
Basically, I have tried many blog packages over the year, and some cmses (what's the plural of the abbreviation anyway?). I don't have any fancy requirement; most of the packages I tried do a more or less good job (although the cms'es were all way too complicated). From what I have read, Drupal should do the trick and help me be more flexible than wordpress which I currently use.
However, there is one area that I can't really judge well from reading up on things on this site, and that is the topic of photo albums and photo integration. With wordpress, I use wpg2, which quite frankly sucks - Gallery is a great gallery software, but it's just not integrated at all into wp (and, I presume, the same holds true for Drupal's Gallery module).
So this is what I am looking for:
- Classic nested photo albums, browseable, with photos tagged by topic and location (taxymony (sp?) should do the trick, I think)
- Comments to photo pages integrated into the overall system (a given as well, I presume)
- Use of photos from albums in articles etc
-- Inclusion "abstracted" - I don't want to have to use img src tags
-- Clickthrough to photo page
-- Use different thumbnail sizes, for example for index pages, "featured posts" etc
-- Watermarking
-- Protection vs external sites linking to images directly to steal bandwidth
-- Exif parsing
-- Tagging images (and articles, really) with various cc: licenses
- No hacks - I don't want to rely on a half-hearted, unsupported, badly implemented method (yes wpg2 sucks, did I mention it? :)
- Some way to upload and edit images "en masse"
There seem to be several methods of "image" support for Drupal, and various modules that do some of these things, but how well do they work together? How well are they integrated into Drupal? What are general pitfalls? Is drupal suited for image-heavy sites? Are there any great examples of article-image-integration using drupal?
Thanks for the help! :-)
-RB
I don't think that you will
I don't think that you will find something that does all of that seamlessly. Plus, you state that you want something with "no hacks" because you want it to be stable or well supported. I don't know if you will find. Some of the things, (i.e. Protection vs external sites linking to images directly to steal bandwidth) is more of a server issue than anything else.
Is there a particular site that you like?
I don't know if drupal is ready out of the box for an image heavy site. That would require some custom code. But, then again, with caching enabled, the performance should still be pretty good.
I would recommend that you download a copy of drupal and a few modules to play around with the features. Then, you can will have a better feel for the entire CMS.
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http://eUploads.com
I have begun testing drupal,
I have begun testing drupal, Looks pretty nifty so far. I am still fiddling with the basics however, so I am still interested in pointers on good image support modules.
My "no hacks" comment may have been a little harsh; by no hacks I mean I don't want a solution that half-works, isn't integrated with the main software itself and doesn't do anything well. As I said, I am pretty tired of the wpg2 module - at first when you try it it looks okay, but in the end you just hit the corners immediately when you try anything more than "link this image".
I don't intend to be "image heavy", as in images would not be the main focus of what I am trying to build. But I would need something that lets me choose at least between several thumbnail sizes, and has a page (node) for the image itself that can be commented upon etc. Ideally, those images would also be arrangeable in a photo gallery.
G2, in what it does for photos, is really good, but also really overkill for me. It's the wpg2 module that's bad.
Oh, you can't really protect yourself from bandwidth theft/direct linking in Apache alone, as the only way to do it is a referrer check, and that's unreliable. Better to do it with php, where you can check for sessions etc. But if this doesn't work I wouldn't get hung up about it; the Apache method works OK for most cases.
- RB
Better photo album integration
I've wanted the same things as you RB, and would love to see Gallery2 integrated into Drupal. I have about half a dozen Gallery2 installations on my own sites and those of clients, and love the power and flexibility of the program - if only I could drop it into Drupal!
So far, the best photo album module I've found for Drupal is acidfree - a long way short of Gallery2, but not bad.
http://drupal.org/project/acidfree
Thanks, I'll check that
Thanks, I'll check that out.
- RB
Dont' presume - install and test gallery module
I think my needs are similar to yours, and I find the integration of Menalto Gallery 2 and Drupal to be more than adequate using the Gallery Module http://drupal.org/project/gallery
Hm, at least it does look
Hm, at least it does look better supported than the wpg2 plugin. But does the plugin let me choose arbitrary-sized thumbnails? Does it integrate all users between drupal<->gallery2? Are comments integrated with drupal?
- RB
Gallery2 / Acidfree
Will either of these have module releases for drupal 5 in the near future? I had been trying to install Gallery2 into my Drupal site, and realized I don't have a 5. module to install - which probably explains why it isn't working - keep getting errors on the url input.
Any ideas?
Gallery 5.x module available
As of April 24, 2007, the Gallery 5.x module is available at http://drupal.org/project/gallery.
The Acidfree 5.x module is still in development (http://drupal.org/project/acidfree.
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