Hidden page as large image repo/store - plausible?

[Rob]

I've been thinking about ways to integrate some image management into PW for our new site build, and here are the options I've come up with so far: -

1. Image template type, with a simple image field and tags field. So basically adding a new page for each image. Unfortunately, this is painfully slow for adding many images, and using pages as objects for generic storage might not be scalable or sensible in the long run.

2. Develop an image repo module. This is no doubt plausible, but also complex with my current level of experience with PW. I think that might be biting off more than I can chew right now.

3. Extend image fieldtype to have a tags field (as well as image itself and description) and then have a single page with single images field where images can be added, tagged etc. These images can then be filtered/pulled into other pages with the API.

Does the third option sound plausible, and would I be entering into a world of pain with scaling issues? Also, once the images ran into hundreds, would the interface for adding/removing be awful? One endlessly long page?

Ultimately I guess lots of potential/current PW users need some sort of media management functionality, but I may not be the man to build it. Not yet anyway!!

Thanks in advance.

[Nico Knoll]

Some and I thought about this to. And we created this module, which works like a file/image manager. Just have a look at it:

[ryan]

Rob, I think that's a difficult question to answer without knowing what you are going to be using the images for? Because I think the approach would depend on the eventual intention and use for those images.

I don't see any scalability problems with #1. But you are right that it won't be as simple to upload images as it is with a multi-image field. Though it would be fairly simple to build a module (or even a template) that takes all the images from one page and turns them each into their own page.

For #3, here's an example of taking the image field and making a new one that has custom fields attached to it:

You are right though that once you've got hundreds of images in there, that might be a little difficult to administer as these things are not paginated in the admin (though not an an issue from API usage).

[biotech]

I was just contemplating concept similar to the #1 as well. Simple template with image upload field does allow multi image upload - so basically just 1 page per file type. But it also fails sort as requires uploading first then going to content page.

It is little odd to have images filed(s) disjointed from content/body field and usage though TinyMCE. In some cases this is great feature when we want images to be separate from content for uniform display and out of authors hands - article thumb, category image etc. On the other hand using the image browser through TinyMCE does not offer full file manager - no upload. The same for Nico's module (which looks great) but it is more of a 'clean up' tool than something that can be used while content is being entered.

So any word on possible central location file manager? Maybe with jQuery rather than TinyMCE - http://elrte.org/

Thanks for your ideas.