Hi Everyone,
I have been reading about various Image related modules and Drupal for quite some time, however I am still somewhat confused by everything.

Here is what I want to do:

1.) Provide an Image Gallery
2.) Associate and image post (gallery post with taxonomy terms)
3.) Show images uploaded by user to gallery (probably using the views module)
4.) Be able to insert images into articles relatively painlessly and provide a teaser (thumbnail) image for the homepage.
5.) Automatically resize images to required dimensions
6.) Allow common users to view and insert "only" images they have uploaded into their own blog / forum / story posts etc..
7.) Ideally it should store the uploaded original images and create derivatives into smaller sizes. Thumbnail etc..

At first I used the Image module which seems to be ok, but I have also read about creating a gallery with CCK / Views / ImageCache.

Also is it true that you cannot upload more than 1 image per post with the image module? Am I missing something?

I read an article on lullabot that was useful, but I'm still confused with all the modules out there.

I'm using Drupal 5.x for now, but would consider Drupal 6.

Any help would be gladly appreciated.

Cheers,
Gavin.

Comments

WorldFallz’s picture

From your feature list it certainly sounds like the image module with imagecache (for auto resizing) is what you want.

There's no question image handling (or any media handling for that matter) is a confusing topic in drupal-- if only for the plethora of options out there. Other all-in-one type solutions you might want to look at are the asset and acidfree modules.

And as you mention, there are more manual ways of implementing galleries as well (with cck/imagefield/imagecache/views). There's a good video on this (see Creating Maintainable Image Galleries) as well as a handbook page (Multiple galleries and taxonomy).

I tried just about all the modules out there and ended up going with a manual solution (using cck/views/imagefield/imagecache/lightbox2). The all-in-one modules work, but you are pretty limited to doing things their way and I wanted more control and flexibility. It's not really what i would call a "beginner" task, but it's not incredibly difficult either. Plus, once you've learned it you can adapt it to pretty much all your drupal projects instead of wasting time trying to find the right module for each project.

just my $0.02 worth--- ymmv.

===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
-- Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Search is your best friend." -- Worldfallz

awolfey’s picture

I like using cck, imagefield, imagefield gallery and lightbox2. There is a patch for imagefield that lets you upload a group of zipped images. You'll have access to your derivative sizes in Views for any use you can imagine.

Any user can create a gallery.

Only thing you can't do here is associate a tax term with each photos. It would have to be associated with the node that contains the imagefield gallery. But you could use views to build a gallery of imagefield galleries.

Another thing is you can't find an image for use in other nodes (as far as I know).

For your numbers 4 and 6 I use a different method, tinymce and imce.

Good luck. I had to try several options before I found what worked for me.

WorldFallz’s picture

we seem to have arrived at the same method, lol.

Only thing you can't do here is associate a tax term with each photos.

I overcame this by limiting imagefield to 1 image per node. My galleries are a content type of their own (and thus also a node) that display the images that "belong" to them via a viewfield. (the imagefield nodes select which gallery they "belong to" via a nodereference field. I currently have it limited to one, but I don't see any reason it couldn't be a multiselect and thus allow the same image to be listed in multiple galleries. Using this method I can then use taxonomy on my galleries and/or images anyway i like. I can also separately control permissions for galleries and images. The only thing I haven't figured out is how to have images inherent their view permissions from the gallery.

This is for gallery type images. for posts, like you, i use tinymce/imce. I like this separation because not all images i would insert into a post are necessarily gallery-type images.

===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
-- Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Search is your best friend." -- Worldfallz

gav240z’s picture

Thanks for the help, I think I'll need to re-read this post a few times for it all to absorb. I've not used CCK and Views modules yet - although I would like to.

I'll view those tutorials and see how I go.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds image handling in drupal difficult.