After designing and theming with Drupal for almost a year and a half, I realize now that if there is one thing that is not easy with Drupal, it's creating Image Galleries.
I now know many ways to create image galleries (image, image_gallery, imagefield, views, etc. etc. etc.), but none of them feels to me like the ideal solution. The way I see it, Drupal does not have a "proper" image gallery module. And more important, none of them are user-friendly enough.
I've been thinking about how we could use the node system to create image galleries, where images could be re-used, categorized, organized... and how to make all this easier for the end user. After sharing these ideas with the Raincity folks, I came up with this outline for a new, flexible Drupal-native image gallery system.
As you may know, I am not a coder (and I can hear Katherine, Steve, and Boris laughing right now). But I have done a lot of work on user interfaces (if you read my last post, you can see the design work I did on Views2, imagecache, and imagefield. My main goals with this project outline were:
- out of the box image gallery functionality
- flexibility for site admins and developers through the use of CCK, imagefield, and imagecache
- integration with views and organic groups, as well as per user image gallery support (galleries are nodes)
- re-use of images (images are nodes)
- easy mass upload for users and admins, as well as other batch operations, especially gallery organization
- use of AJAX where appropriate for better usability
As I said, I'm not a coder. I don't have a full plan on how to build all of this. My developer friends here at Raincity have said that some of the AJAX image uploading and the node relationships are going to be tricky. But I'm confident that you smart Drupal people will be able to help figure that out :P
Depending on the feedback we will receive, we hope to develop this module by using a reverse bounty to finance its development.
Please find the full PDF attached to this post or embedded below:
[Document originally embedded here from Scribd: Ajax-img-gallery; also attached as Ajax-img-gallery.pdf.]
Feel free to comment this project idea, either here or in the Image group on groups.drupal.org. If you or a client would like to help fund this project, or if you would like to help develop it, please get in touch. If there is enough interest, we'll set up a donation page and go from there.