Update, Delete, Image Management.

Imagefield Import does a good job at auto-loading lots of nodes with images. You Ftp images to a folder, trigger imagefield_import, and voila' you have created a bunch of nodes... Oops, suddenly all the images are moved to some other folder, but okay, that's one way to do it. I made a relatively simple tweak to read title and body from Headline and Caption-Abstract of the IPTC segment. (I used exiftool to export a json sidecar file for each image, and then I'm able to read all kinds of EXIF data as I wish.).

I would like to manage my images and galleries folder by folder using ftp. So if I wanted to update an image OR JUST THE TITLE AND BODY OF THE NODE, I could simply over-write the image in its folder, and press "update" in Imagefield_Update.

Although it doesn't work with nodes, Fast_gallery handles the update, insert, delete pretty well. To get the combination of features I want, I'm faced with modifying fast_gallery to import to nodes, or Imagefield_Import to keep deal with updates and deletes.

What Imagefield_Import would need

Imagefield_import would need to create two tables. One to keep track of the images, their directory/filenames, and probably some update or do-not-overwrite flags. A second table would keep track of which node used the image. The location module schema provides an example, see tables: Location and Location_Instance.

With tables in place to keep track of the images and nodes, the code needs a the logic for doing the updates or deletes. Perhaps a little more logic to create insta-galleries based on folder names.

I'm posing this suggestion before doing any large scale one-offs of Imagefield_Import on my own.