hi all
i'm working on a product catalog for a store in drupal7.
for the products, we've got a number of gallery images which i'm currently handling in the content type as field_images and within the feed import as 'image1,image2,image3'.
the curve ball we've recently been dealt is that our product gallery images are now pairs of images so the client can specify a different file which can be used for the crop image.
feed import as 'image1|alt_image1,image2|alt_image2,image3|alt_image3'.
I know that i can deal with this via a field collection but am also aware that this will make my import process a lot more complicated.
So my question is, does anyone know of a way or a means to extent the images filetype so i can render 2 image fields per image row so i can use feeds in its simpler way (without using field collections) or is this the territory of field collections and buggering about with my product feed importer?
Much appreciated
Mike
Comments
Fieldcollection field feels natural
Had a bit of a thought and field collection feels the natural way to implement, making the import more a of a drag.
I have got around this kind of thing for a while by being in the lucky position of being able to specify to the designer that images maintain the same aspect ratio at different sizes, then images styles can mostly be used to keep the client happy as scale and crop always works as expected. I appreciate that in some cases though there really is a use case for completely different image even then.
It sounds as if this if one of those little surprises that adds more time and complication, I would be interested to hear if there is a more lightweight solution.
Seems a bit heavy for just a cropped version of the image
Field collection would indeed help, but I keep reading that it's a bit of a performance burden.
Personally, I'd investigate better ways of handling the crop image from a single image field. There are loads of cropping modules available for Drupal these days. Check out Manual Crop for a start. Any module that's compatible with Smart Crop as a fallback is also worth considering IMHO.
One image or two
I read it that both images had to be be displayed somewhere, on the site if only the crop image needs to be displayed then the simplest solution would be to not import the the full version at all (which may be hanging around in the original date for legacy reasons only).
The other problem would be the gallery aspect (which i assume means a repeating image field one piece of content. Manual Crop is very useful, although it can be abused by clients and multiple versions of it could make admin performance sluggish on the version I used (a few months ago).