Drupal image management

Question

Please suggest how should I approach these requirements. What ready-to-use solutions (modules) are best suited to achieve something like this:

What I need is an image library that has searchable, tagged images that are already resized when we publish them. If the author searches the library and the image he needs isn’t there, he can upload one and have it added to the index. The important thing is that images in the library can be sorted into three categories: News images, top story images and feature images so that, over time, we don’t end up with hundreds of images crammed into one folder, thus making browsing a pain (and to prevent someone from something like: Searching for a keyword so they can find an image for the news, picking an image, and then seeing it’s 1600X. 1200). Also, I need something which will assemble thumbnail galleries easily. I don’t want to have to go to the image library, get a URL, go back, paste it in, etc. I should be able to pick, say, 8 images and say “create gallery”. How this objective is achieved is flexible, but I am looking for a shortcut to get around assembling screenshot galleries by hand.

Answer 1

You could create an 'Image' content type, using CCK and Imagefield to store the image.

Images could be classified into the three categories either with a CCK field or using the Taxonomy module, and the Taxonomy module would allow you to set up a separate vocabulary for tags. Taxonomy terms would be searchable with the core Search module by default.

Imagecache will allow you to specify image display presets - for example the user can upload any image (e.g. 1600 x 1200), but when it's displayed ImageCache will create a resized version (e.g. 400 x 300). You can specify multiple presets, allowing the image to be displayed at different sizes in different locations.

For manually creating galleries, you could create a separate 'Gallery' content type, with a Node Reference field to 'Image' nodes. I don't know of a 'click to add' type module as you seem to describe, but if the images are well-titled they can be easily added when creating a gallery through the auto-complete widget.

Otherwise, the Views module will allow you to programmaticaly create listings of images, for example of all recently uploaded images.

Answer 2

try http://drupal.org/project/media in drupal 7. please notice neither drupal 7 nor media module are released, so expect loads of work in order to either backport media module or bugfix drupal 7.