seems simple enough BUT the client wanted two things that where not that easy. One of which I could not deliver at this time.

1. Attach Images to a node and NOT allow users to insert images in to the body this way the template will control the layout of the images.
2. Select from existing images seeing thumbnails for the images to choose from and filter as needed by taxonomy.  And if possible (NOT) choose more then one to attach at a time.

So how to do that?  I still tend to stick to the Image module for 2 reasons. One I like content as a node. But more then that the other solutions do not allow mass importing (that I know of).  Maybe node import would let you do it but Image module right off the bat lets the user dump all their images into a folder and import them making nodes.

So with the Image module as my base the next effort was attaching. Image module offers Image Attach but the key here was a visual interface to attach the image. Image Attach is just a boring select list. Node Reference Explorer gave me some hope as it uses CCK Node Reference and make an Interface (using Views for this) to display the data and fields that you want. But days later and numerous bugs, uhg.

Image Browser what a nice looking module but no cck ie attach to node system that worked. The one I tried actually broke verticaltabs.

Alright moving on, then there is the often mentioned Image Assist. So this is what I ended up using BUT the trick here was I made a CCK Text Area field with 1 line so that the user is just adding this one line of code via Image Assist. Not perfect but I felt it was very usable.

That gave me the Attach not Insert image to the node feature and the interface to do it.

The only hurdle was that I was using Views 6.x-3 and I needed to downgrade it to 6.x-2

I made a quick video on the results you can see that here http://blip.tv/file/3871092

Good luck,

Here is a link to the related module http://drupal.org/project/img_assist
Image Assist