How do I create an image gallery in Drupal 7?

Question

Which is the best way to upload images and show them up in galleries.

There are many options out there, would like to know which one plays best with Drupal 7.

Solution 1

have a look at http://drupal.org/project/media and http://drupal.org/project/media_gallery

Solution 2

In the past, I've just "rolled my own" by creating a simple Image content type. If you're willing to create some content types and custom Views), you can create a powerful node-based gallery. This is a pet project of mine; I am currently developing a simple module creates an Image content type with:

• Body text/teaser provides searchable short and long descriptions
• Built-in image field (CCK-image in D6)
• image_tags and image_collections vocabularies. Quickly create "galleries" by using the autocomplete taxonomy widget. Use Pathauto to automatically give these vocabularies SEO-friendly URLs.
• EXIF fields for desired piece of EXIF data. Store these as terms in image_tags (or similar).

It takes a little configuring (hence why I'm making the module), but it is a solid setup IMHO. You will need to do a little coding to format this data in a user-friendly fashion, but it's worth it.

The Media and Media Gallery projects @rakke mentions look promising. As for January 2011, they are still under active development but do have recent updates. These will surely give your site a more "polished" feel.

Comments

[rakke]

You're right that it's still under development, but it have worked good for some simple tasks on my sandbox site. I also firmly believe that if we want to help the developers we should start using it. It's already at beta3, and from these developers I will argue that the quality should be close to many stable modules. Remember that 3 of these guys work full time in drupal in Acquia. That said, I also believe that your take has some advantages. i.e. Media uses entities, which currently have no comment module.

[Courtney Christensen]

@rakke: Maybe I'll give those modules a shot again...I want to like them! I tried them back in December when they were in a somewhat broken state and decided to revisit the method described above in my free time. But I'm all for a widely adopted image system. Thanks for the update @rakke!