art morgue, day 2.5

Today was a very productive sick day, though I must admit that after today I am not very pleased with data syncing & media handling in Drupal.

My photo morgue is now usable, locally. I decided that my local copy will be the master copy...and I will table any sort of sharing until I can solve some other large obstacles.

I was able to build the entire project out of various modules, with no coding - just configuration. I looked very deeply into data syncing, embedded images & lightbox. My ultimate desires for this project are out of reach at the moment.

Some obstacles:
* image, embedded media, the flickr field & imagefield all handle image thumbnails & views separately. Not only that, but the fields that embed (emfield and flickrfield) only create pointers to the full size images. They do create thumbnails locally. Imagecache is unable to process files from external website (without code.) Basically, since I want to do more with views, I am very unhappy with the fact that the images are not downloaded or able to go through imagecache.

Also annoying, lightbox with views will only display images from the same field, so if you have 4 different kinds of fields, it can't play the slideshow for all the images.

My hopes are that all of these modules run through theme_image(). If they do, then I will do something to push the embedded fields into imagefield & run that through imagecache. Or else I will convert everything to file attachments. Standardization would be very helpful here.

• file syncing: of course, views rss has some sort of hard coded node preprocess variables that i wasn't able to easily adjust. I think the real problem (with using views rss & feed api) is that images get saved as either media (with media rss plugin) or rss enclosures. feedapi can't read the enclosures or media...and views can be rewritten to make the image 'original url' so that the feedapi element mapper can find the image. so aggravating.

Otherwise, my little project is totally useable. I am realizing that I've really needed it all this time. Not only is it good for drawing, it is also good for designing stuff on the computer. Basically anything where you wanted to keep track of images with important information.

I am going to draw some pigs now.