A Better Image Management Module for Drupal

Drupal image management needs improvement. The image above was resized manually and uploaded using FTP software. The link to the image hand-coded.

It's been said before. Drupal definitely has a weakspot in image management.

I've tried a number of options over the past few months: Image module, Img Assist, IMCE, and lately CCK + Views + Imagefield + Imagecache. These are all reasonable solutions for part of the problem but I haven't found anything that really handles everything, and certainly never elegantly.

What I do like is the direction in which Drupal is headed with CCK and Views. The ability to create custom content types with custom fields is great and I found a good tutorial for setting up a gallery using Views. It also takes advantage of the Taxonomy module for categorizing the images into libraries.

I think this strategy of using the different puzzle pieces that are already there to build the system is a good way to go. Taxonomy is good at categorizing images, views is good for creating customized lists, tables, and pages for different content types, and Imagecache is perfect for automatically creating different sizes or versions of uploaded images, e.g., thumbnails. It's a very Unixy divide-and-conquer strategy. I just think there are a couple of pieces missing.

I think what we need is a way to create macros in user-entered text—specifically, image macros which get translated into <img> tags. The macro should simply point to the node ID of an uploaded image and specify the Imagecache preset (e.g., fullsize, thumbnail) to use. Some layout configuration would be good, too. When the text is "translated," the image tag gets filled out with the correct source path, alt text, and dimensions. Once we have that, then we could build a front end for picking an image and generating the macro, or possibly adapt it from one of the existing media library components.

That way we keep the flexibility of using Taxonomy and Views to define the galleries and we can easily point to the image content from any text block. Plus, the advantage of using macros is that when the images sizes (Imagecache presets) are adjusted, the width and height attributes on the image tags won't be left behind.

Alright, so it looks like a neat idea on paper, but I'll have to see whether it's practical and of course, whether there's any time to do it. (-; I'm not saying that I can just come in and solve "the Drupal image management problem" but I can definitely solve a few of mine.

Actually, what I'm really hoping is that it already exists and I've just overlooked it somehow! So if you're already using the ideal image module then please, please let me know!!