Image handling

How do you insert an image into your page? How do you upload image files? What are the alternatives to the Image module? Here are your choices for image handling.

See also File management modules (http://drupal.org/node/265416) and Editor, Filter and WYSIWYG modules (http://drupal.org/node/255599) for other ways to upload image files and work with content editing.

Eventually I found image upload information buried in Asset and media management modules (http://drupal.org/node/206708).

Some image upload modules create a node per image and you can then use the nodes with modules that would not recognize an image. You want simplicity when first loading images, something like Image Picker. Later, after you add image uploading for lots of users and people leave, you want ways to review and organize images, perhaps the gallery included in the Image module. If you have already selected a gallery module or a specific content editor, then you need compatibility with those modules.

Image

http://drupal.org/project/image
Creates a node per image and includes a gallery option that works with taxonomy terms for organization. A good choice if you are not using a separate gallery module. Documentation: http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/image

Creates a content type of image containing an image thumbnail. This basic functionality will be included in Drupal 7 core along with the API so that other modules can use the image.

Visit the admin page for the module to create the directory for the images and review other settings. Visit Administer > Site configuration > Image toolkit to set the JPEG image compression.

Image Attach

Image Assist

http://drupal.org/project/img_assist
Adds on to Image. Connects to TinyMCE via Wysiwyg API. Requires Views module.

Image Browser

http://drupal.org/project/imagebrowser
Adds on to Image. Alternative to Image Assist and IMCE for image browsing. Requires Views module.

Image Picker

http://drupal.org/project/imagepicker
The Image Picker module is an image upload feature modeled after the image upload currently built into Wordpress but with a few improvements.
Could be useful when converting a site from Wordpress. Does not create a node for the image.

Image watermark

http://drupal.org/project/watermark
Adds on to Image. This modules allows a Drupal site running the image module to overlay each image with a watermark. The watermark is a PNG (24 bit) file with an alpha channel, but other formats may work.

IMCE

http://drupal.org/project/imce
Works with FCKEditor, TinyMCE, WYMEditor, and other editors. Has quotas and upload limits you can apply to users when you open the upload floodgate to the whole world.

This module combines the useful bits of Image and Image Assist for adding images to content using just one module and no fancy prerequisites. I selected IMCE for http://ignitesport.net because there are a small number of editors and they each use their own selection of images.

The image is not attached to a node, leaving you without taxonomy categorization and some other features you would use in sites containing many images and many content editors looking for images from a combined library. A site like imdb.com would require categorization by movie, actor, year, etc, and would look for an image node.

Upload Image

http://drupal.org/project/upload_image
upload_image.module takes uploaded images, that are attached to nodes, and creates image nodes from them. Thumbnails are shown in place of the file name in the list of attachements.
The module depends on both upload.module and image.module.