We’re new to EE and we want to be able to upload images to our site with lots of metadata (photographer attribution, copyright, tags, etc), and reuse the images arbitrarily, whether inline in a blog post or grouped together in galleries.
I’m seeing a lot of workarounds, some requiring multiple add-ons to fulfill the need. See here, here, here, and here.
I’d like to propose an alternative that is simple and clean. I’m not entirely sure about its feasibility, which is why I ask.
1. Create an Image Channel, allowing you to upload images with whatever associated metadata you desire.
2. For embedding in blog posts, create an image browser module that pops up showing the images within the Image channel. Selecting an image inserts the html markup for it into the editor, with a custom attribute like “ee-id=’[image channel entry id]’”
3. On save, convert image html tags with the ‘ee-id’ custom attribute into EE tags (like {richimage id="[image channel entry id]"}) that will render the image markup with metadata (i.e. copyright).
For other uses, shouldn’t it be easy to re-purpose the images within the Image Channel via a relationship module like Playa? Just define a Gallery Channel that has an association with Image Channel objects.