CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm wanting to provide a means of uploading photos and then displaying them on our public site.  The photos would be uploaded by certain contacts (who are Drupal users) and then displayed nicely in the search results list and individual listings shown to other logged in users of the site.

I'm aware that each contact can have a Contact Image.  I've also seen that you can have custom data File field; when exposed in a profile an image file is shown as a nice thumbnail which you can click on to show the full size image.

I was hoping to let people have many photos.  If a custom data set allows multiple records, then the set file field is not visible in a profile, so I cannot immediately let people upload multiple images.

A crucial feature that I want is to resize images before upload so as to make upload times bearable and not exceed upload size limits.  We've used plupload elsewhere to do this task.  It uses various runtimes to achieve this (Flash, HTML5, Silverlight).

I guess that the best way to do this would be to add a new Input Field Type of "Image Uploader" for the File data type.  The Image Uploader would use plupload to let the user upload one or more files, automatically scaling to specifiable dimensions and image quality.  Potentially a smaller thumbnail would also be stored so as to make showing the image in lists quicker.

A simpler way of doing this job would be to have a separate Drupal module that uploads multiple images and stores the image files in the right civi place and stores the details in the right civi tables.

An even simpler method would be write a Drupal module but store the files and info completely outside of civi.

I haven't looked at the output side yet.  I'm assuming I'll need to customise templates to display photos nicely.

An comments or suggestions on the above welcome.

PS  I'm not going to do this straight away as I want to upgrade to Drupal 7 and the latest version of civi first.

Thanks Chris