Imagefield configurable upload thumbnail size

I have a related question, isn't it better to add support for imagecache to create the thumbnails, would be a lot cleaner?

Peter

OK, but one final remark, is it possible to put the thumbnails in a separate directory, otherwise it's confusing if you use the files in IMCE for example? Can't be that hard to do?

The idea was a thumbs subdirectory as a child, not a central one, but you're right updating can be complicated.

I'll check at the IMCE for exclusion patterns.

Thanks
Peter

Really depressed about this new 'thumb.jpg' in the same directory decision. It's like the Image module all over again. Uggh, such a step back.

No thanks to any feature that doubles the number of images in my directory. IMCE is just one of many file browsers that this makes a mess of.

In my studio we actually mount our remote drives with a MacFUSE-based system that allows us to use Adobe Bridge, Lightroom, IView Media Pro and even Aperture to browse these files. Sure we can make a bunch of rules and filters to get around the mess but we shouldn't have to.

It also makes it a pain to rsync and backup these important directories, again, I realize we can make a bunch of exception flags, but this is just the kind of speed bump that makes these things painful.

The beautiful thing about imagecache is that it keeps all the expendable, reproduceable derivative files in a separate directory tree, with each derivative preset in its own directory, making it trivial include/exclude non-original files.

If all thumbs were stored in something like a central "thumbs" directory then the filenames would need to be checked for uniqueness on each thumb, and stored as data with the imagefield in case it had to be modified.

This is exactly the kind of stuff that imagecache cleanly mitigates. It stores no data and makes no assumptions. Very clean.

They could be stored in something like a thumbs subdirectory of the directory containing the originals, with some small modifications to the code. However that would also involve an "update" in the module to move all the thumbs people currently have into newly created subdirs, which may not be very exciting for the maintainers.

Speaking of update excitement, we should also consider the fact that the new 'thumb.jpg' feature provides no upgrade path from Imagefield 5.x (yet). In these cases, there is no existing .thumb.jpg so the path breaks and the admin form has no thumbnail at all. A quick survey of the issue queue suggests that this breaking of backward compatibility is already unnecessarily blocking many users attempts to upgrade to Drupal 6.

I can appreciate not wanting to add the imagecache dependency, but, as I stated in a previous thread

Imagecache provides such an elegant way around this kind of mess. We should use Imagecache to create these thumbnails or not do it all.

- If you don't have Imagecache installed, your thumbnail is simply the original file, optically scaled to look like a thumbnail. This should be perfectly acceptable for the kind of beginner level user who doesn't have Imagecache installed.

- If you do have Imagecache installed, you can specify a derivative to use in the field settings form. Or Imagefield could just automatically generate a derivative for this use.

This would also mitigate the problem of all the missing ".thumb.jpg"-style thumbnails after attempting to upgrade from Imagefield 5.x. As it stands now, these image paths are completely broken in the admin form.

just a question before trying the patch. Is therea croping functionnality or, if you entre a 100x100 size, the picture is rezied to that without respecting the proportion?

I'd be fine with making this a configurable option. I'm also not real pleased with the creation of *.thumb.jpg files, I'd prefer we stuck them all in a single directory similar to ImageCache and maintained the original file hierarchy. But regardless, that's not really the focus of this issue.

This patch has a problem where it won't update images to the new thumbnail size if the size is changed after several images have already been uploaded. Perhaps we could add a check on the existing thumbnail when a node is being edited to check that the thumbnail is the right size (and exists at all).

I created a patch against the latest beta that allows you to use imagecache for the thumbnail previews, see #402014: Use imagecache for thumbnails

This is *sort of* fixed with #307503: Move *.thumb.jpg files to a separate directory. There is now a "hidden" variable for "imagefield_thumb_size" which defaults to 100x100. You can change this with the devel variable editor or hand-coding it in settings.php. I only left it as a variable so that I wouldn't have to clutter the UI and because there wasn't a very good place to put a global setting like this for ImageField.

Instead I'd like to focus on attiks's patch in #402014: Use imagecache for thumbnails and make ImageCache presets an option for thumbnails instead. That setting will actually be exposed to administrators, so they'll be able to configure the thumbnail size that way.

I agree making ImageCache handling the thumbnails for ImageField would be the best solution here. Mostly because both are making their way into D7.

Cheers.