O images, images - wherefore art thou image handling?

Not in the default install of Drupal core, that's for sure.

Along with a the lack of a native WYSIWYG editor, proper image handling support is one of the major complaints against Drupal (did I mention the steep learning curve?) Luckily, there's a robust and very (very) busy community of developers who spend an inordinate (and possibly unhealthy) amount of time writing excellent modules for Drupal - one of these is called ImageField.

ImageField brings to Drupal the ability to add images to content in a big way. It utilizes a standard "Browse" (or "Choose File") HTML widget to allow users to select images from their local machine for uploading to the web server when the page is submitted.

Consider the following senario: you're building a Drupal site that chronicles major playwrights throughout history. For each one, you have a bevy of images that you'd like to include as part of the each writer's page (a "node" of the playwright "content type" in Drupal-speak). For example, let's assume that you have the following images related to William Shakespeare:

• 2 images of the man himself
• 3 images of his boyhood home
• 2 images of the Globe theater
• 1 image of an old playbill from a production of Othello

In addition to associating each of the images with a single writer, you also need a malleable way to display the images, depending on the context. What's the best way to build an infrastructure to handle this? Easy. Use CCK, ImageCache, and ImageField. This noble trio of modules allows you to attach multiple images to each piece of content on your site then have the flexibility to display them to your end users in a variety of ways.

While CCK is the framework that allows you to add additional information to nodes (other than the default "text" and "body" fields) and ImageCache handles all the image manipulation (mainly resizing and cropping), ImageField takes care of getting the images from the hard drive of the person creating the content to your web server.

Going back to the Shakespeare example, perhaps the best way to accomodate the list of available photos is to set up 3 ImageField fields for your "playwright" content type: an ImageField for portriats, a second ImageField for biography-related images, and a third ImageField for miscelleanous images. Then, taking advantage of ImageField's ability to accept multiple images per field, you'd be able to upload Shakespeare's 2 portraits into the "portraits" ImageField, the 3 images of his home in Stratford-upon-Avon into the "biography" ImageField, and the remaining images into the "miscelleanous" ImageField.

Once the images are uploaded as part of a node, they are available just about everywhere the node is available including in views and standard node displays.