Adding Images to your text

There is a choice of facilities for adding images to text items, with pros and cons of each.

1. The Image module, and associated features. Makes each image into a Drupal node, which ads a lot of capability.

· Image_Attach, which adds a separate image field to the target node, pointing at the image node. Provides simple image upload, but little other control.
· Image_Assist which embeds the image in a text field. Provides visual image selector, upload, and control over size and left/right float. Adds necessary HTML to text field.
· drupalimage plug-in to TinyMCE editor which makes Image Assist work with a TinyMCE field, which displays the result as a WYSIWYG image (though not styled fully according to your theme).

Also untested further features, including:
· Bulk upload facility
· Interface with the Drupal Gallery support module.
· Similar interface to the Acidfree support module.

2. The CCK ImageField. Very similar to Image Attach, but just uploads image into a filestore file, and again contains little extra control over e.g. sizes or styles. It is almost invariably used with Imagecache to give fine control for resizing.

3. IMCE( demo at http://ufku.com/drupal/imce/demo). Provides facilities to upload and search for images on the server. Functionally similar to the Image_Assist/drupalimage combination, but the integration with TinyMCE is neater for inserting images, and there is more control over the attributes of the image once inserted. BUT the image filing and select window does not look so nice – to the point of affecting usability, and there are bad things on the Blogs about the associated gallery function.

4. Or go to FCK Editor. From the demo seems as good an editor as TinyMCE, and has its own image upload and filing mechanism. But:
· No automatic creation of thumbnails etc. (cf Drupal Image)
· Images are simple separate filestore files – may be a benefit depending on what one wants?

I have oscillated quite a bit, but (at the moment) am going with the Image module:
· Install the Image module as normal.
· Do the stuff in http://mybesinformatik.com/tinymce-and-drupal5 to add the drupalimage plugin to TinyMCE.
· Tune the settings in the TinyMCE Profile to show the features required.
· Create a Taxonomy to allow tagging of images for easier retrieval.