Image reuse outside of TinyMCE

[thetuningspoon]

Hi guys-

I'm building a site which has large background images, some of which will be consistent across pages and some which will vary with each page. I would like to be able to allow the client to select the background image for each page.

Since these are very large images, I don't want to just provide a standard image field, since this will mean the same image will get uploaded to multiple places/pages. Since I'm trying to provide a good user experience for the end user, I don't want their browser using up bandwidth downloading the same image multiple times.

What is a good way to do this? I know that with TinyMCE you can select an image stored on another page, but is there some way to do this without a TinyMCE field? I'm thinking of setting up a page as a central repository of shared images and then providing some way to select between those on each individual page, but I don't know how/if this is possible.

Thanks in advance! 

[apeisa]

Simple way would be just use page per image (and then choose background with page field):

/background-images/

/background-images/first-image/

/background-images/second-image/

/background-images/third-image/

This solution also scales, when your client wants to have different "color scheme" per image etc.

[thetuningspoon]

Thanks Apeisa, that works well for what I'm doing. This is my first time using the page field. Now I know what it's for

On a related note-- what do you guys do for the template for a page that is nothing more than a container for other pages (i.e. the "Background Images" page which has the images as child pages). I created a new template without a file called "none" for this purpose, but wasn't sure if there was a preferred way of doing it.

[apeisa]

That is pretty nice way to do it. Usually my sites have lots of metadata pages, so I collect them all under page called /tools/