By htyson on

This is my first post on Drupal.org and I am pretty new to Drupal. I am currently working on a website for a client who is a professional photographer and I am using the ecommerce module with CCK and imagefield to change the Apparel product type into a Photograph product type. (I used apparel so that I could easily add a drop down option to offer print size selection before ordering).

I know that my client would like the ability to upload an entire folder of images and have the website dynamically create individual products nodes for each image. Is this possible?

The idea would be that at the wedding he could give everyone a URL that they could visit the next day to order photos from the wedding. I know that there are paid services that perform this function currently but my client would prefer to handle the printing and hosting of the images himself.

I know I may have to code a module for this functionality but I am really not sure where to begin, I have some limited experience with PHP and I just bought Pro Drupal Development as a first step in the right direction.

Any ideas?

Thanks!!!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

Lowell’s picture

Lowell commented

I am working on a similar project with sporting event photos. I'll describe what I am doing and maybe we could join forces and share with each other.

So far I have got the ability to easily upload folders of images and even retain that directory structure from within Drupal using the new webfm module. It was a little tricky at first to get set up, but so far I love it. I will be uploading 2000-3000 photos in multiple folders at a time and this module appears to give that functionality.

Next I've got some ideas started on automatically creating the nodes and attaching these photos to unique nodes if I want a 1 to 1 relationship between photos and nodes.

Once that functionality is in place, I need to learn how to automatically generate thumbnails and previews, and then finally set up the e-commerce end of it for user memberships, file and photo downloads, and even some advertising space on the website. All of this is rather new to me so any pointers are appreciated.

The views module and theming the nodes will probably do most of the work on the production site. I'll take a look at the Apparel module to see what you are referring to.

htyson’s picture

htyson commented

I'm sorry I did not respond earlier, I have been working long hours on a non-drupal project. I would love to join forces and share information on this! You could probably generate all of the preview images with imagecache. I'll have to check out webfm and how easily they might integrate. What are your ideas on node generation? If we could do that the ecommerce module could handle the rest of what we both need, i think.

dman’s picture

dman commented

I'm not sure that creating thousands of 'products' would be the right approach for this.
I'd probably try to model the transaction as the purchase of a 'print' with the imageID as a specification/detail on it.

However, I don't know how to do that either (I'm muddiling through ecommerce myself trying to draw the line between unique product and a feature on that product/subproduct myself)

Seeing as you have to create a thousand image nodes anyway, maybe it doesn't make a difference. Just a random thought.

.dan.
How to troubleshoot Drupal | http://www.coders.co.nz/

.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards

Lowell’s picture

Lowell commented

this is the approach I am attempting now, after several other divergences. Too bad I didn't understand you BEFORE I had to figure out this approach myself (I'm always learning everything the hard way)

I would like to append the url that calls the "add to cart" function with the imageID and I am looking through the e-commerce modules to find a way to catch and retain that information

Any insight will be appreciated. I am a beginner php programmer and I just barely understand the Drupal ways with hooks, etc

Lowell’s picture

Lowell commented

I too have been working long hours.

I've also been fighting with the gallery2 module, making it work effectively but haven't been able to integrate it with the e-commerce module yet.

I'm at the point of starting over with this webFM idea and building my own gallery with views that mimics the features I am now using in gallery2 (a good staring point)

The developer for webFM suggested a non-node approach but after thinking about it (correct me if I am wrong), nodes are really just database entries anyway, and every image has its own database entry already. So is there extra load because they are called 'nodes'?

With nodes I can use all sorts of tools, readily available in Drupal so I'd need a solid argument to not use nodes.

I agree that e-commerce products would be difficult to manage with 100,000 products. I haven't looked at this problem yet, thanks for pointing it out. Maybe this is where the effort should be placed, in an e-commerce module designed to manage that kind of volume.

The imagecache will probably be most useful, I just couldn't understand how to use it at first glance. I intend to use webFM simply to get my images into the Drupal database. From there, it's just a matter of using the table entries to find the images, and then ?imagecache? to serve them?

cgallo’s picture

cgallo commented

Hello, I just created some type of solution for this. It uses the image_import module.

What i did was this, when the image is imported i automatically convert it to a product and also create any subproducts needed. It is not very clean, but i am willing to post in case someone has the skills to clean it up and incorporate it to the GUI.

please let me know if someone is interested.

melchior’s picture

melchior commented

hi cgallo,

I'm very interested in your approach.
myself, I'm trying to do sth. similar for video uploads.

would be nice if you're ready to share your code.
If you want you can contact me directly at forum @ omoo . de

greetings,
marco