Image Composition

Image composition let you create a composition of images of different aspects and dimensions, then scaling them to fit into a single rectangular block on the page.

It's a wrapper around the the "magazine layout" algorithm described by Harvey Kane http://www.alistapart.com/articles/magazinelayout/

2014-06 deprecated in favor of Imagematrix, or collageformatter.

This allows you to add multiple images to a single node and then choose to display all of them together nicely when viewing the node.
If you want a view renderer that will do the same thing for the results of views then please see Imagematrix. It does the same thing, in the same way, using a copy of the same code, but works on compositing view results. This module works on multiple image fields attached to single nodes.

D6 & D7 rewrite

The original module developed by clemens.tolboom for D5 used the same basic approach as the later versions, but is replaced by a similar version by dman (originally sandboxed as imagefield magazinelayout as an experiment)

D5 is still available if you want it.
D6 is a direct port of imagefield magazinelayout but has almost no configuration options (like setting width) so play with the -dev version if you want - it works fine, but is unsupported/no-further-development

This project is being re-animated for D7 because publishing configs for field formatters is now easy, and the basic underlying code is all there already. So YAY.

Configuration (D6/7)

You should have a content type that has an image field attached to it. eg 'article'.
Manage fields for that content type and allow Number of values to be greater than 1 (eg 'unlimited')
Manage display for that content type and choose format : Magazine layout for that content type and view mode (eg 'full view;). You will also be able to choose the width of the rendered block there using the field UI.
Attach a number of images to a node of that type.
All the attached images will be collected and displayed in a relevant, resized layout when viewing that page.

Code details

None of the branches (at 2012-06) have rewritten the original code to be at all 'Dupally'.
There is basically no theming available, no formatter callbacks or hooks you can use to modify the layout post-generation. It takes the magazinelayout algorithm and pastes it into Drupal HTML output.

Any number of improvements could be made, but they all require rewriting the code library entirely into Drupal-think. This would be fun, but it's not been done. As such:
This module produces a block of fully-formatted HTML that renders the images you give it according to the rules it knows.

TODO, it would be nice to add links or lightbox pop-ups to those images. Not currently easy

If you are able to make it more flexible, please have a go, but many "feature requests" may mean "a complete rewrite" so don't expect much joy there unless you do it yourself. The code is fun to work with however.

(If somebody wants to do the "complete rewrite as a GSOC project - this would be cool, and comparatively easy)

Similar modules

See

• Imagematrix
• collageformatter

for the same or similar algorithms.
Both these modules provide views formatting support as well as image field formatters.
You should probably use one of those instead of this one nowadays.

For reference, the original algorithm was provided here http://www.alistapart.com/articles/magazinelayout