Create gallery from uploaded directory

It seems to me that there are some additional things that should be taken into concideration while a workflow like this is developed.

All of a "User's" files that personal workspace should be a unique directory for that user. Not like the image.module does today putting all images ina single directory. This is necessary so that a user "can" be deleted with all of that user's content without having to dig thru and hand delete things posted in someone's personal gallery from amongst the stuff from every other gallery.

Basic permissions. A user must have the ability to make any image note private or public. If public to what degree of public, other users as individuals or as groups. I believe that some form of leach protection should also be implemented, this could be especially important for images.

I'd also suggest at this point that there should be a system gallery. This would be for the general storage of images to be used by the system or the system admins. Yes, the images/files/nodes/content for this system gallery also require the ability to be individually marked public or private.

In my mind, the process for manipulating images by resize or rotate and such is and should be a different process than catagorizing the image. I don't see how manipulation of an image (most likely via a program like Imagemagic) is not the same is editing the text associated with this node. I do like the idea of defining tabs for these functions as it would reduce the length of the page for Create/Edit Image.

i've already mentioned this in another post, but i thought i would chime in and elaborate a bit here. it seems to me that all all the thinking i've heard on this subject has been a bit rigid when it comes to integrating images into dupal posts. rather than a separate "gallery" type workflow, i'd rather see full integration of images into appropriate node types (blog, page, story, comment). the whole idea of a separate workspace and the steps needed to manipulate it and make multiple submissions seems unnatural to me. i think a having a separate gallery workflow should be an optional thing (if not completely nonexistent), and that including images with posts should be completely integrated into the normal posting workflow, particularly since the ability to add attachments to posts already exists. like so:

1. user goes to blog (for example) entry form, enters a title and description as usual, and chooses 1 or more images from the local hard drive (ideally selecting more than one at a time).
- the selection of images could be done via a separate "browse" input element, or an "upload images" checkbox next to the attachment input element.

2. now two things can happen
a. the user clicks "preview post" - here the user can add captions to the thumbnails, and ideally do some image manipulations.
b. the user clicks "submit post" - the post is created just like it normally would be

that's it. short and sweet.

regarding permissions: i don't know that much about the drupal core, but it seems to me that the same permissions that govern the blog post could be inherited by the images that were uploaded - and the the images code be stored as nodes so that they could potentially be used again somewhere else, and so that the proper drupal mechanisms could be applied to them internally.

again, i'm just guessing about the drupal core architecture, but it seems to me that (without all the extra potential configuration goodies), doing it this way would require 2 main hooks:

1. thumbnail creation upon image upload
2. proper rendering of thumbnails and images when the post is viewed

if people want to do more complex things (the vast minority of people), like cataloging, or tuning the layout of a posting. then they can use the already available tools for uploading images as nodes and annontating them or including links to them in "pages", or "stories".

this way seems much easier for the average user to get his head around than all the multistep processes i've heard described. i'm just having a hard time understanding why everybody wants to draw such a wide line of separation between image postings and non-image postings - it seems to be adding unecessary complexity (programmatically, and for users). why can't they be the same thing? this of course would also eventually extend to other media types... isn't this how it will be sometime down the road? don't we already have the knowledge to build it this way now?

IMO, the whole idea of a "gallery" is rather antiquated, and what people really want are blog posts with images - and the optional overhead of maintaining galleries.

i'm willing to accept that maybe there are fundamental flaws in my reasoning, but this all seems pretty reaonable to me...

also, on a side note: why isn't the subscription feature enabled on this site...it's really difficult to keep up with discussions without it...

thanks,

srs

you can now use the image_import module to pull in a bunch of files and create a gallery of them.