[support] Drupal for image management, with metadata

[Pierre Rineau]

Le lundi 04 mai 2009 à 09:20 -0400, John Callahan a écrit :
> I have a large collection of images (11,000 at the moment and growing) 
> that I'm thinking about using Drupal for.  I'm wondering if anyone has 
> experience doing this and what modules would be beneficial.  Using each 
> image as a node with a decent taxonomy should work great for search and 
> discovery.  Views, lightbox, etc.. would work well for display methods.  
> However, three questions I do not know the answer to are:
> 
> 
> 1) batch upload, even if only one directory

For batch upload, you shouldn't experience any problems, image module
does it well (as I remember, with a sub module which is packaged with
image), you give to it a folder in your PHP upload dir and it imports
all your images with taxonomy you gave.

> 2) reading EXIF/IPTC image metadata and mapping them to taxonomy terms 
> and/or CCK fields. 

I did not try any EXIF/IPTC image extraction, I guess there are some
modules which handle this.

> 3) syncing attributes (i.e., edits to raw image EXIF/IPTC can 
> update/reimport the node fields/tags and edits to node fields/tags can 
> update the EXIF/IPTC metadata.)

I think that, if you want to do a full CCK based site, you can use
ImageCache / ImageField, but I have not enough experience with those
modules to tell you if they are this good. The problem with those
modules is that your images will only be visible as CCK field values.

Image module has a great advantages, WYSIWYG great integration with
img_assist, well working views integration, and each image is a node
(which you can use as a noderef field later with CCK).

Doing views taxonomy and/or CCK based should works well with both
solutions.

I think you should also look at existing gallery modules, there is even
a gallery2 integration module which exists, using the gallery2 API to
display your gallery2 managed galleries into a Drupal (in this case,
Drupal does not handle itself the images).

> 
> I'm using Gallery2 right now (http://gallery.menalto.com/, 
> http://drupal.org/project/gallery) and it does some (item #1 and 
> partially #2) of what I need.  It even integrates nicely with Drupal for 
> users and display of images and albums.   However, I use Drupal for many 
> other sites (and I'd like to use views, lightbox, tags, etc...) and 
> wondering if I can bypass Gallery altogether.  Any thoughts or 
> experiences out there?   Thanks.

I did successfully set a custom gallery using Image/img_assist/views,
based on CCK views, and a bit of theming. The only problem I got is for
user rights management (as my albums are taxonomy based).

> 
> - John
> 
> **************************************************
> John Callahan
> Geospatial Application Developer
> Delaware Geological Survey, University of Delaware
> 227 Academy St, Newark DE 19716-7501
> Tel: (302) 831-3584  
> Email: john.callahan at udel.edu
> http://www.dgs.udel.edu
> **************************************************
> 
> --
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Pierre.