It's 2011, why is making an image gallery so hard?

ah-- this seems an even better method. I'm still working on retooling my thinking for d7. excellent suggestion.

The OP eloquently speaks for many - perhaps a silent majority - of the Drupal community. Who are the lumpen proletariat of not-especially-skilled users, newbies, part-timers, SoHo's who need sites beyond what they can afford.

This is a debate that needs to be had, somewhere, and the developers will not like it. The invariable response is contextually correct but unhelpful: "this is FOSS. If you don't like it, participate, fix it yourself". It also misses a significant part of the point.

What we are complaining about is the sheer impossibility of mere mortals being able to keep pace with a moving, shape-shifting target whose complexity appears to be increasing exponentially. Each successive edition of Van Dyck's Pro Drupal Development seems to increase page count by 66%.

What we are complaining about is that Drupal seems to eschew evolution for perpetual revolution.

Each new version sees mass disruption of modules and recreation of problems that had been solved along with a whole lot of new ones. Exactly because of the way FOSS works, it is not the community as a whole who chooses this path but a relatively small elite of expert developers. There is no consensus to this, it is boiling Darwinism. This ecosystem produces stunning software for sure. But FOSS isn't a food chain that needs to care about users who for the most part are getting something for nothing and not paying in kind by participation. It is, however, like any ecosystem: a delicate balance between healthy sustainability and inadvertent mass murder, or at least mass misery, that begs some important questions.

Aside from the moral and philosophical arguments that make FOSS interestingly bipolar political, there are times when I wonder whether any CMS that regards its content as secondary to its innovative ingenuity has gone off the rails.

After years of coming to hate static HTML I thought and still think that content is primary. In a CMS the means to access and present it should never disappear. Yet look at what has happened to the Image module & image gallery and the 80,000+ users now trying to wrangle half-working migrations to other modules. Drupal is a bit mad in this. Imagine the outcry if Facebook or Flickr innovated users out of access to their material. OK FOSS is different, but "fix it yourself" or "just carry on using the old version" are at best power without responsibility if it allows developers to trash things that people depend upon. You can't really call that community.

I got into Drupal c.2006 4.3, after 10years of static HTML and a year with a commercial Perl-based CMS that promptly went bust. The company, Arborior was killed off by FOSS just as I was completing my site and waiting for a bugfix. I tried several of the victors. Most seriously Mambo/Joomla but after a month I hit a wall of limitations that ruled it out for me. Drupal seemed vastly superior with its Lego-like philosophy. Even if the learning curve was ferocious, the flexibility was unbounded. That was the theory.

I am not a programmer, I am a photographer. I was right about the learning curve. It took me months before I had any sort of basic comprehension of Drupal, over a year of late nights before I had a working site as I wanted it. I'd managed to integrate Menalto G2 and that was great for 10,000 client photos, all segregated into tightly permissioned private photolibraries, but wrong for portfolio and photo stories. After trying every Drupal solution, Image was the only one that worked for me, with the fewest limitations. Those were so blindingly obvious I was sure the community and I could sort them out.

I'll tell you want they were, because it illustrates perfectly how Drupal is capable of blind spots.

One was that although multi-taxonomies are fundamental to Drupal, Image had no means of keeping track of the current taxonomy when advancing through images that inhabited several terms. If I had an image that was categorised as both and "reportage" and another categorised as "reportage" and "animals", paging through "reportage" would switch the category to "animals" by the 3rd and subsequent photo. Hopeless.

The other problem was that there was no "next" or "previous" link on each image node, you had to go back to the image gallery thumbnails to navigate. An absolutely fundamental omission, even a paperback allows you to turn pages without having to return to the index. Yet that couldn't be solved without curing the multi-taxonomy derangement.

Another was that there was no means of setting the order of image nodes except date or weight. Which is fine if you have just a few pics, and insoluble if you have a lot and update frequently. And if you wanted to exhibit a lengthy photo narrative, which like one of mine runs to 84 pages, you were in a mess.

The "community" had noticed all of these, and there were countless support threads raising the issues and suggesting workarounds and half-baked hacks. Being new to Drupal and Php I couldn't tell which were likely to work, and most didn't. It took me until D5 was replaced by D6 to solve these problems on my 4.7 site. I then moved to D5 and had to do it all again. But I was slowly getting better at this Drupal lark. I created and offered patches (mostly not my own work, adapted hacks from the community of the afflicted) to fix multi taxonomies, to get Image working with Nodeorder, and a custom Image pager module. The maintainers dismissed them as "too specific for Drupal" without further discussion. They worked fine, were built to Drupal coding standards and were just what dozens of threads had asked for. But the gods had by then decided that CCK, Views, Imagefields and the whole unfathomably complex rats nest was a better solution than a single simple module that a muppet like me could understand with a few years effort.

These were simply not issues that concerned the expert maintainers who could have coded solutions in minutes back in D4.5 days. But they clearly frustrated large numbers of users over and over again and were absolutely basic usability issues. Yet they never got fixed in 6 years and still are not as Image is consigned to the dustbin of history, and those of us with hundreds of images invested in it are left floundering with dozens of modules now required to perhaps do the same simple thing if we can only figure out how, no clear migration path to D7, no clear outcome. I think the reasons for this are interesting and important.

One reason for this disconnect is given on the Image module page, that few developers use Image as a site component. Perfectly understandable. Images are incidental for many people, it was never that important to them, and easy to move on.

Also I suspect the people at the cutting edge of Drupal development and direction simply have different priorities to the bulk of people who actually use the stuff they make. I've worked with a pro programmer and seen that the interest for him was doing clever stuff. He was undaunted by complexity as it increased the intellectual challenge. As skill increases, so does the capacity for going to new, esoteric solutions, and learning is the reward. And stuff never gets quite finished. Once the exciting stuff is done, the dopamine ebbs away and it's on to the next big challenge.

So sticking a couple of next & previous links into Image gallery was banal unappealing drudgery. I even offered $200 at one point, with no takers. Later, when I actually managed it, I was terribly pleased with myself as I'd managed this simple task that took me many days. Someone who knew what they were doing could have done it over coffee, but they had moved on.

So instead we got the impenetrable shining black marble obelisk of Views, and a lot of puzzled monkeys like me dancing round screaming in terror. For the high-level developers who shape Drupal, I'm sure it's the constant challenge of the bleeding edge that fires them. But for the long tail of users, this constant reinvention is often disruptive and overwhelming.

That old chestnut, stick with the old version, is advice that I followed. Until a few months ago I clung on to my hacked and patched D5 whose Image handling worked properly. Then one day it didn't work because the hosting co. retired PHP5.2 which broke the site. Since when it's D6... and no pictures... on a pro photographers's website. Image gallery is now just a stub for Views. I can't simply hack its code to reinstate my stuff, and what I get now is incomprehensively disordered and deranged, missing text, the lot. I'm sure it's possible to get working with the new regime, I just don't know how many weekends and late nights.

I am seriously thinking I've had enough. Maybe it's time to admit defeat by Drupal's relentless learning curve. The only reason I haven't is my investment in content and getting to where I was. Oh, and my sister's site (tapestry fine artist) and friend's site (painter), both favours, not paid work. But Image deprecation makes it likely I'll have to start from scratch anyway with D7. I live in fear of D7, and whatever D8 turns into.

I've worked with other CMS a bit, especially Textpattern on a legacy site I've been lumbered with. I've not found Drupal's snakes n'ladders repudiation of version continuity at all. OK, it doesn't have Drupal's CERN-like atomisation, but you don't need a PhD to get next and previous links on images.

I find this so exasperating. I like Drupal. I am not asking anyone to do anything for me, never have. But when the FOSS mantra of "fix it yourself" gets trotted out, I have actually done exactly that and offered it to the community that has been asking for fixes for years, and it has been refused.

I understand Drupal is not a democracy, it is necessarily hierarchical based on engagement and competence at Drupal. Someone has to guide the overall direction of the project as a whole and it can only be those who are expert and I certainly am not. But I do wish the experts would recognise that bumbling phpidiots like me may have something to offer in other ways. If over and over again people whose interest and expertise is images point out the shortcomings in Drupal image handling, we don't mean the engineering, whether nodes or files or fields or any else of whatever-the-hell-they-are burgeoning Drupal constructs. We mean simply that Drupal is not very easy to deploy or nice for visitors when it comes to images. This matters for the health and value of the whole project.

Fantastical complexity just seems the wrong way to satisfy diverse requirements when most of the people implementing those requirements have simple needs and simple minds. I once thought the modularity of Drupal would resolve this with relatively simple modules around an image API. Now, I haven't a clue what to use or how, and that's after reading tutorials, discussions and docs. It appears that in order to put up a show of pics I have to get my thick head around not only Image but Views, CCK, Filefield, Features, Imagefield, NodeReference, Ctools, Litebox2, ImageAPI, Imagecache, Custompagers, and about a dozen submodules. ... Perhaps it's time to fork Drupal to an idiots lite version. There are a lot of us.