image in core - from a users perspective

Hey people
ive just posted a wishlist for the image in core, that walkah were talking bout at the drupalcon barcelona.
i thought it would be a good idea to share this - so we can figure out what we want in this "imageincoreoneandforall" :)

link to the original post at my blog: http://morten.dk/node/174
flickr screens: http://flickr.com/photos/mortendk/tags/drupalimagesincorewishlist/

its still a working draft so spelling errors missing stuff etc ... ;)

Dear Walkah - the wishlist for images in core
original post http://morten.dk/node/174/
Dear Walkah - This christmas i wish for world peace, that my beers always is served cold, more metal in the airways and a kick ass image handler for Drupal.
A user perspective of image handling in Drupal.

One manager to rull them all.
The different approaches that each module have have today are very diffucult for the users to work with (and even som geeks) we got the
image is added to a node and cannot be reused on the site again but its posible to cached in different sizes (cck & image cache),
singe file (IMCE) works as a centralised storidge manager, but not possible to create ned sizes with cache
attached to the node (image attach), predefined sizes
the user image & avatars
Let us stop the madness. one image manager for image inside drupal, if you add a picture to you cck widget it goes into the manager, if you ad an image to a user profile it goes into the manager if its added through tinymce well it goes into the manager.
So when you have to find that picture again you know where the image is.

The manager can be called as popup window, a ajaxy thickbox thingie, or an expandable div inside the page, and add the images to drupal.
A user can access and work with all images that have been uploaded, and dont have to take into account if its an user picture, a cck image or an attached image, or any other kind of image, its just an image.

add, replace & remove images into drupal

Where would we like to work with the images...

1. cck widget

• The user can replace an image thats already added to the manager (or replace it with a new)
• If theres more than one image we can change the order of the images.
• Title & alt is inheritet from the original file, the user can overwrite em at each cck adding
• If the user wants to add a new image it can upload directly as we do now im the image widget or open the manager an add it through here.

1. text area: wysiwyg & text
   The user can add an image from the manager or replace it with another image.
   The user can select the different imagecached presets that have been set in drupal or create a new variation of the image.
   crop resize etc, image magick stuff - and then save it and add it to the manager. (yai photoshop built in javasctipt & xhtml ...mmm)

2. profile image (avatars)

•When a user adds an image to his profile its store in the manager the image is stored in the manager (folder defined in the settings as usual?)
• If the user have permissions he could have acces to a predifened collection of avatars.
• permissions for how many images a user may add to the avatar folder?
• if the user removes the refrence to the file should it be deletede or only removed

4.terms

Why oooh why dont we have en easy way to add images to terms - again add image to term from the manager and voila
with the use of image cache. we could have a nice page with an image for each term
(like übercart: http://www.ubercart.org/files/screenshots/product_catalog.jpg)

1. gallery
   A gallery would be a taxonomy term
   a gallery can have a special selected image as identifier for the gallery (add a image to a term se above)
   a gallery can have a desciption

An image can be added to more than one gallery
each image posibility to hook up with drupal functionality: comments, send to a frient, add to favorites, vote, add term, whatever...
add weight to each image in the gallery to change the order of the images in the given gallery
the gallery can have each image sorted by date, title etc

All these functions must be accessible from the gallery control panel (lets make it easy for the people man)

[GALLERY control panel]

1. block
   Add an image to a block do it direcly through the image manager - or should that be done inside a html field instead?

Upload & import images

Browser upload:
- upload 1. image at a time through the manager.
- flickr like import of multible images
http://flickr.com/photos/upload/
http://swfupload.mammon.se/

FTP upload & structures in the image folder
when a user is working with a lot of images its gonna be a real pain to upload them one by one.

Lets say the user have 50 different galleries that is store as folders on the harddrive an she wants em all online fast n easy...

upload all the folders to files/images/
and then go to the import image folder option and upload each of the folders as image gallerys

if a folder haves images thats not importet they can be importet again
</photogeek example>

[Screen of import images]

Folders with images can be importet an each image & folder is registret into drupal and used as an gallery.
This gives the user a way to download all the images again at a sane level instead that all the images are in one folder (and the user can actually again export the image if he decides to not use drupal anymore)

To have all the images in one folder is a real pain, and unless theres a really good reason for that we should try to work in a way a user would store the data (and so the quickly can add images from iPhoto, lightroom, etc)

Metadata import
When a file is importet lets use the metadata and add those to the terms for the image
exif import (adds as terms)
iptc import

filestructure for the images

Local based images:
images/
images/foo
images/foo/bar
images/bar
images/bar/foo
images/mortendk/barcelona2007
images/mortendk/brussels2006
images/mortendk/sanfran2007
images/adminGroup/foo
images/adminGroup/foo/bar

external disk amazons S3
have no idea at this moment how it works etc
but again the users should then just add the images through the manager

Manager: edit / properties / delete / information bout each image

property editor:
add default title & alt tags to the image
add terms to the image (might be importet from iptc/exif data)
lets the user add new terms for the image
checks the permissions for the image

whos my daddy: before you wanna do crazy stuff with an image it would be nice to know where its used at (delete?)
which gallerys are the images a part of

Normally you would only remove an image from a page element
if you wants to remove it 1. you must have the permissions 2. go into the manager an remove

Lets have an easy way to remove 4321 files

[MANGER Props]
[MANGER delete]
[MANGER info]

access to imagefiles

We want to give special users the right to download original image (think - shop etc)
foo.jpg - paying customer
foo.jpg cached 1024 * special users
foo.jpg cached 300 * 300 all registred users

Filter in textareas?

Maybe it would be wise to have a filter so instead of using in a textarea we can use [img cacheprofile="foo"] instead?
then add a ref to the original image so we know wheres the image is used .
If we delete the original image, the image will no longer be shown.

theming

control the imagecache elements directly from the theme / template.php
control siziing from cck through the display options

Its importent that the themer can controle the image cache driectly from the templates - a scenatio could be that it were usefull to have 1 image size for block-leftbar.tpl and another for block-right.tpl

links
http://flickr.com/photos/upload/
http://swfupload.mammon.se/
http://www.ubercart.org/files/screenshots/product_catalog.jpg

modules:

am
images
imce
tinymce
imagecahce
cck
imagefield

so Walkah - when will it be done ;)

/morten.dk
noget med ILD