I'm looking to move my Gallery (i.e. Menalto Gallery) albums over to Drupal. There are many advantages to that, which I assume people reading here can readily see.
At the moment, though, I feel like Drupal is missing some important Gallery functionality and that I will need to do some patching. I've seen people speculate that in the long term image management will move to using CCK and that the original image module may be deprecated in the future. I don't know whether there's anything to that speculation, but it makes me want to ask where people think Drupal is headed and if I were going to be making patches or whatever, where to put the effort.
I've been playing with the image handling options in Drupal, and have seen a lot I like in AcidFree and in CCK + Views + Imagefield. What I see missing and what I would like to add are as follows:
All drupal album systems.
- no manual sort. To get a manual sort, you would need to use numeric titles and sort by title (01. My First Image; 02 Next Image; 03 Image after that). Gallery allows all the sort options that you get with AcidFree, plus manual sort (and has a nice ajaxian "rearrange" tool, though I can get by without that).
CCK + Imagefield + Views
- no mass upload
- no mass edit
- need to create a view for every gallery, so very user-unfriendly
- difficult implementation of gallery hierarchies, a standard function of most dedicated gallery apps.
AcidFree
- Views of albums don't have access to the album thumbnail field.
So as you can see, AcidFree has almost everything I want, so I would take that as a starting point, but wonder if long-term (looking to Drupal 6 and 7), whether it's better to try to add the relevant functionality to CCK albums.
Thoughts? Any general advice on approaches?
Cheers
Comments
Just a quick suggestion:
Just a quick suggestion: Have you thought about using the Gallery integration module?
newms
I should say that there is a
I should say that there is a *lot* of functionality in Gallery that I don't use or use but can live without. If I needed everything Gallery had to offer, that might be another situation. Gallery is an awesome piece of software and I really respect the way it's built and the way it works, so not taking anything at all away from that. However, some of the advantages I see to using drupal only are
I just think that if I go to the trouble to solve the issues I mention in the first post, that having just drupal will make everything easy to maintain. I have, by the way, built small sites that do use Drupal image management and have been fairly pleased, it's just that with this site I still have a couple of thousand images to add and I want to get the system dialed first.
Yosemite Explorer - hiking and climbing in Yosemite (drupal)
Hmm...
AcidFree uses Views, so everything should be available; worst case, you might need to add a bit of Views table linking, but that isn't hard. Also, Vern Mauery is very responsive to user requests for support.
As for Image being deprecated in the future, I wouldn't count on that happening for many years. And, as a matter of fact, drewish just committed (a couple of hours ago) a views .inc file to make it easier to use images with views.
Nancy W.
Drupal Cookbook (for New Drupallers)
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NancyDru
tongue in cheek
I would not take half that podcast seriously. Some of the items discussed were certainly reasonable in the near term but some items in that podcast were just flat out crazy talk.
I have chatted with a few who have stated that they successfully used views and image_cache to replicate the portions of a Gallery site that was relavant to their needs. That said, no one's put up a site recipe on how to do it for the masses yet.
image module is a module used on drupal.org so in general it will be updated.
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Thanks guys. I know that
Thanks guys. I know that AcidFree uses Views now, but I didn't see right away how to get the album thumbnail into a View. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. I'm not asking support questions, so much as strategy questions about directions Drupal will take for image management long term.
What I really wanted was reassurance that AcidFree+Image looked like it would be around for a while.
The CCK+Views+Imagefield+Imagecache option is really intriguing, because in general I love CCK+Views, but it seems like it's a long ways from being, as you say, ready for the masses (meaning, user-created albums that fit within and create on the fly new categories in a hierarchical taxonomy).
So I think I'll try to work on AcidFree to get what I want and maybe come up with some worthwhile patches to contribute if I can find the time.
Thanks
YW
For D5, Acidfree went through a major rewrite, so I suspect Vernon has plans for keeping it around a while. It certainly has quite a following. I'd rather see it completely replace Image Gallery.
I too like the CCK/Views implementation, but it is definitely not the user-friendly solution that AF is. If you don't plan on users maintaining albums, it's a good solution. I think the major strength of this solution is image annotation; that is the ability to add additional text fields to the display. However, with AF using Views itself, I think there's room to do the same with AF.
Nancy W.
Drupal Cookbook (for New Drupallers)
Adding Hidden Design or How To notes in your database
NancyDru
I think the major strength
That's the main thing that attracts me to that solution. CCK + Views gives so many options for annotation, sorting, searching and formatting. Aside from the image gallery issues, it has effectively ended my need to hack Drupal.
That's my hope. IF I can get the best of both worlds and add manual sort, it's goodbye Gallery! I like Gallery, but getting rid of it will simplify my life.
Yosemite Explorer - hiking and climbing in Yosemite (drupal)
Manual image sort with AcidFree
As I say, I wanted this thread to be a strategy thread, not a practice one, but I raised the question of manual sort of images so I thought I should mention solutions here, even if that wasn't my original intent.
In playing around, it occurred to me that it's quite easy to force a manual sort by simply sort by date created, and then just adjust the date created so that the gallery sorts as you wish. The creation date of the node is probably either relevant to the sort and you want the album in chronological order anyway, or it's irrelevant to the sort and it makes no real difference.
At least in my case, it's the image capture date that matters, and you can get that from the exif information.
Having realized this, that solves the manual sort enough for me. Now if I can just get the AF album thumbnails exposed to views, I'll be all set.
I think the more important task in terms of ensuring the future of AcidFree at this point is simply helping Vernon keep up with the rapid changes in drupal. AcidFree 5.x is still in beta and the code freeze is on for Drupal 6.
Yosemite Explorer - hiking and climbing in Yosemite (drupal)