Drupal image modules

Hi Nolan,

As with a lot of areas of Drupal, there's a number of ways of doing things depending on what you want to do.

ImageField & ImageCache is one of the most popular solutions as it enables you to attach images to a content type and create various thumbnails etc.

Image module enables the creation of a content type specifically for images.

Embedded Media Field (http://drupal.org/project/emfield) is good if you want to use images (or any media come to that e.g. audio, video) from a 3rd party, for example YouTube for video.

...and a whole host of gallery solutions depending on what you want. I ended up making my own gallery solution - a lot of people use the gallery2 integration but I found it particularly a pain trying to work with two systems.

They're trying especially hard to make it easier for image managing though and there's been a lot of work done on media mover lately (http://drupal.org/project/media_mover) which is an attempt to bring a number of different methods together in order to provide a better solution and one interface to all of these above things. I haven't used it yet, and I've just tried downloading it and you need to download the latest -dev version for it to work with the latest version of Drupal (I'm using the latest version of Acquia Drupal from http://acquia.com/).

It would be worth watching a couple of related videos from the recent DrupalconDC (http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=drupalcondc) - there's one on 'the state of multimedia' here http://www.archive.org/details/DrupalconDc2009-DrupalMultimedia and another on Media Mover itself.

If you let us know what exactly it is you are trying to create, I might be able to help you decide which is the best approach to solving your particular problem.

Clear as mud eh ;)

Hi Nolan,

If you want people to add inline images then I believe something like http://drupal.org/project/imce is what you're looking for - it integrates with a number of WYSIWYG editors. A google for 'drupal inline images' may help here too - it's not something I've played with that much I'm afraid.

If you want to create a specific layout, i.e. an article with an image which appears at the top then it's probably better to use image or imagefield and imagecache to create an image cck field. They would all need to follow a particular set format though.

I'm not sure how they achieved the block at the top of that theme page - I had a look at the source and it's a view so perhaps it's just a view listing just the images from the latest articles. It wouldn't work with the inline images method above but would work when you have a known quantity of images such as in the second example using a cck field.

You might want to take a look at one of the jCarousel modules for Drupal which will provide similar but with left/right buttons and scrolling etc. - here's one of many:

http://drupal.org/project/viewscarousel

You can see a basic example of jCarousel on a site I did last year for Mazda:

http://www.wearetriathlon.co.uk/gallery/album/761/photo/778

HTH - let me know if you have any more questions, and if you can please do post your solution once you've decided, most probably will be of help to others in similar situations!

Thanks,

Steve

I have created a YouTube like site using media mover, but it wasn't a pleasant experience. I was converting files from whatever format they were uploaded as to flash video using ffmpeg. It still leaves intermediate video files lying around, I did find a module which clears up some of the debris, but some is still left behind.

Also the automatic running of actions at the end of an upload didn't work properly, it did convert the video but always failed to run the second job to create the thumbnail.

It's a module with a lot of promise and if all of the irritations are sorted out it will be very useful.