working on applications and technology

Recently I 'm consider building a travel website using drupal. unlike this website, travel site is supposed to be media-rich , It should have a lot of photos and pictures, video content is also under consideration in the future.

For this website I used to insert flickr image into the article body using the flickr tag [flic**], this kind of image handling might be good for ordinary content website but surely not good enough for a travel website, where we have to be able to assemble photo gallery easily and associate the photo with its original post without much effort.

Another required feature is the image handling of thumdnail creation and image resize and crop. where we could put the thumbnail on the topic listing page (teaser) and show a larger photo in the article or vice versa

These are all image requirement for drupal website and since there 're many image module in drupal , we will compare only the imagefield and flickrfield.

The image-rich drupal website solution: CCK + View + (Imagefield or Flickrfield)

Fortunetly , drupal provide powerful module to implement these feature easily enough. My first though of the solution should use the following module,

• CCK
• View
• FileField (base of Imagefield)
• ImageField or FlickrField
• Flickr Module (the base of the FlickrField )
• ImageAPI ( base of the ImageCache )
• ImageCache ( image resize and scale capability, thumbnail creation etc, not needed if using FlickrField )

But I 'm not sure whether to use Imagefield or Flickrfield for the photo handling. and I will try them out.

FlickrField vs ImageField

Some of the advantage using the FlickrField

• No photo storage is needed from our web hosting, the photo is stored at flickr which have good upload tools to do photo uploading and management.
• I do not have to worry about the speed of large image loading from share web hosting, flickr will handle it well.
• Flickr module comes with native image resize feature that could display a thumbnail in the tease section and larger image in the article body!

But there is one fatal weakness of the FlickrField, The free Flickr account have only  100 picture and 100M storage limitation , we could only display our most recent 100 pictures or you have to pay for it for unlimited upload and display!

With the ImageField module, the photo is fully under control, we could use ImageCache to do any size of scale, resize, crop of the photo, but of course the image uploading & loading is limited to the speed of the shared web hosting.

So if you have a very good hosting and do not want to spend more money , might be ImageField is the best choice! for those with the money , Flickr is an confident and powerful choice although It is not free!