Thread

I am about to move to EE2 and one of the of problems I have always had is managing images to go inside stories, be able to upload them, when I am posting then easily position them in the actual story.

Before I move to EE2, can anyone recommend a way to do this. Ideally it would be great to have all images that are already uploaded from previous stories browsable when posting a new story then, be able to drag it into the post or select where in the post it is placed. I need to avoid any HTML editing or fiddling about because there are multiple editors.

Any advice would be really helpful.

The problem of inserting images into the text flow of an article (and making it easy for users) is not easy to answer.
If you read my archived post “Adding images to entries (an easy way)” you can see the issues and possible solutions.

I have just started working on an EE2 site and am trying to resolve how to do what I want. The downside of my previous method is that some of the add-ons I used are not free anymore. Matrix (equivalent of FieldFrame) is $55 and NSM Transplant (the new LG replace)is going to be $AUD34.95.

That solution still didn’t resolve the problem of someone uploading a massive image file straight from a camera, when it only needs/wants to be 800px maximum. The result is the web storage space is eaten up, long download times and broken layouts.

There really needs to be a solution (that has been asked for many times) that automatically resizes uploaded images to a maximum size set in the configuration settings.

Channel Images may have that as an option, it’s not clear in the docs, but you still can’t insert the images within the text.

I have Channel images but as you say you can’t really position them well in articles. What puzzles me is that EE is designed for bloggers to a certain extent and yet there is no in-built solution. Its should also be taken into account that not everyone has great html knowledge or css, so while I can mange it, some of the other writers can’t.

Thanks for the note, I’ll check that link out and if anyone else has any great ideas please let me know 😊

I installed Channel Images today to test out it’s capabilities.
My first issue is that it doesn’t resize the original image, it keeps it and generates the extra smaller versions.
My second issue is that it uses Flash for the uploading and I’ve just got an iPad!
So I don’t think it’s going to me much use to me personally.

What puzzles me is that EE is designed for bloggers to a certain extent and yet there is no in-built solution.

Hi Rushster,
your question is absolutely valid and I hope, that you will get it answered and/or find a way yourself to solve it.

I´d like to chime in regarding the “designed for bloggers”. Yes, EE has it´s roots in pmachine and especially EE1 had still inherited a lot of the blogging mindset (what is a channel in EE2 was a weblog in EE1).

But as of now, I see EE not as a blogging tool and not as a CMS. For me it´s a code igniter app, that can be used to publish content. I´m a paying customer since 0.95 beta 😉, so I accompanied EE on that route for quite some years.

Installing EE feels more like installing a big CAD system or an Oracle accounting system. You get a great platform, but actually you can´t do nothing with it, before you haven´t added your part libraries or implemented your accounting rules. Same with EE, install it and it greets you with a blank slate and asks “what do you want to do today?”

I love this, but yeah, for a newbie it´s really a bit daunting. My personal view is: There are easier ways to set up a nice looking blog. EE is for the pro who build websites for a living or for the extremly ambitioned amateur. You know, those guys who have a kitchen, that would make a 4star chef envious 😉

awa

PS: Admins: I hope, this is not too off topic. And I know, this answers a question, that wasn´t asked. But I couldn´t back off.

I agree with you awa, I have used EE for well over a year and added some of our own stuff into it such as a vbulletin bridge (can’t believe nobody has created a plugin for this still). No doubt I will have to get stuck into the EE2 but I was concerned that it was now going to be a huge time sink development wise and was looking for some advice on the best way to approach this.

Maybe the approach of this fellow EEer might help you?
http://www.gradualism.co.uk/articles/make-adding-images-to-ee-entries-safe-and-easy/

@Paul Frost:

I believe that our string plugin can do everything NSM transplant can do and more.  Still not free, but cheaper.

As for uploading, if you don’t mind storing things in the Amazon S3 cloud our simple s3 uploader ought to solve your issues with the flash requirement and image resizing. Uploading is done via a standard <input type=“file”> field, images are resized before upload to S3, and thumbnails can be generated as well. Here’s the full list of settings.

S3 Uploader is EE 2 and Matrix 2 compatible so your original approach ought to work without any trouble.  The price jump on Matrix 2 still stings a bit but I tend to use it a lot so it’s maybe not so bad if it’s not being used just to run images in the content.

Don’t mean for this to sound *too* much like an eMarketSouth ad, just wanted to mention the options 😊

Don’t feel bad about advertising, your contribution was very useful.

I knew that a lot of people were using S3 and I had a quick look at it in the past, but it just seemed very complicated.
Your suggestions made me go and have a longer look, I ‘m still confused as to how I can best use it but will persevere with investigations.
My first thought is can I use one account to store/backup all the uploaded images/documents from the 10 or so sites that I manage.
Do you know any links to simple articles that explain best practices for this sort of use?

Am I right in thinking that the resizing on upload is part of S3 services or could you build an add-on that could do the resizing on upload to your own server?

I already use the String plugin on one of my sites (you helped me with it’s use) but hadn’t thought about using it like NSM transplant. I’ll have a go at the coding up a template, I may be back later for help.

The resizing on upload is handled by my add-on, S3 doesn’t provide this sort of thing automatically.  It would be very possible to build a file upload add-on that saved the file to your own server but had the same resize capabilities. I’ve been considering building another add-on out of my image resize code along the lines of imgsizer because I spent a lot of time tweaking the image resizing functions on this add-on to be the best such functions currently available in EE and it seems a shame to use that code in an add-on that only works with S3. I have a couple improvements nearly ready to go that support 24 bit alpha transparency in PNGs as well as color correction as discussed in this article. The EE2 version is ready to go, I just need to port it back to the EE1 version 😊

As for S3, you can have up to 100 buckets for a single account. You can store an unlimited number of files in each bucket. This is nice because very popular sites that store many thousands of files on the server kinda kill the upload directories unless you do something to split the files up by initial letter or such.  For your 10 sites I’d create a bucket for each and then use “folders” within each to split up the different upload directories.  The S3 Uploader add-on gives you control over the file paths for each upload custom field, and a number of variables are available for use in building file paths such as username, group name, dates, etc.

For a basic primer on S3 you could look at these articles:
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/amazon-s3-the-beginners-guide/
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/03/using-amazon-s3-as-an-image-hosting-service.html (somewhat dated but still pretty good)
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/gsg/

I tried to make it pretty simple to use S3 through my add-on though. If you’re just starting out with S3, all you really need to know is your account credentials. The add-on will create the buckets and such for you if they don’t exist when you submit the settings for the custom field. 😊

Hope that helps,
-Ty

@ender
I’d really like to see an add-on that combined resize on upload (to my web space) and imagesizer options to create any size image on demand.

Thanks for the links, I have now got an S3 account.

I’ve had a quick play with your Simple S3 Uploader and have a few questions about it, what is your preferred method of asking support questions as it’s not allowed here now?

you can PM me, skype me (tywangsness, online roughly 8:30-4:30 eastern time), or send email to the address in the readme.