Over the last few weeks, I have worked on this project in bits and pieces. Mainly on the train when I have no internet.

Today on the train, I made some big changes to this project. For one, I added 'imagefield_import' - which did exactly what I wanted image_import to do, except I don't have to use the image module at all. So I deleted all my image nodes, and reimported all my images. So far I have 200 pictures stored in my library, and I have barely even begun to add pictures. I usually google some idea 2 times a week and download about 10 pictures. But that's 1000 pictures a year that I'm trying to use. And very conservative.

The next thing I did was to try to figure out how to scrape images from the web. I'm really glad drupal 7 will just do this. But I'm stuck for the moment, since I really don't have a ton of time to work on this.

For scraping images, some people use cURL to write new images from the web. I got curl to read a file, but then it wasn't appreciating me calling the jpg a gif...so i think you probably have to do something with image content types or headers or something.

Emfield doesn't seem to scrape images...but otherwise it is pretty useful...and I did find a solution for my workflow of wanting to bookmark images. Basically, I just send the picture to delicious, import that RSS feed into a feed api enabled node. Then I used feed element mapper and that module allows you to map delicious's 'original_url' to emfield. ('original url' is parameter parsed from the RSS feed, it was a fieldset i found on the mapper page.)

I am importing the feed nodes into a separate node type since i'll be adding and deleting them while i tweak the system. So for, this seems to work - it did load the bookmarked image link to emfield. So...if I can just scrape the image from emfield and store it, that would be great. Then, if I can store it, I can run imagecache on it. Though, I remember that if you resize emfield, it does store a local sized copy, which can be read with imagecache. I did have to add emfield fields separately to my view, and as you can see in the screenshot, they look awesome & stretched.

So I'm happier now: I can import images to imagefield & bookmark images with the tools from my browser (delicious & firefox bookmarks) and then turn those into images that I can display with lightbox. Just a few more tweaks to go!