Photo Albums on Agaric Sites: How to Upload Pictures

Adding pictures to an Agaric site with an image gallery can be done photograph by photograph, like any other content, by categorizing it into a picture gallery vocabulary (category).

However, for people who have an expensive digital camera and have discovered that it frees them from 24 or 36 pictures at a time by a factor of 10 to 100, Drupal sites made by Agaric (OK, any Drupal site with image module) can take mass upload and import of photos (or any digital image).

(NOTE: If your site is Agaric-made, Agaric may have taken care of the next few steps for you. Skip to post-setup instructions.)

Make sure you create the gallery you want to put the pictures in first. (Although with the taxonomy_switch module which Agaric updated to Drupal 5, you could move a free-tagging term -- if you've created a folksonomy for photographs -- into an image gallery category after the fact.)

You probably want "promote to front page" taken off under Publishing Options for images if you don't want every one of the hundreds of pictures you upload on the front page, depending on the setup of your site.

Change this at:
admin/node/types/image

On the same page you can turn on or off comments on images by default.

It's not in Agaric's notes here but it's probably necessary to choose what directory on the file server image_import will look at to find pictures to Drupalize.

To this directory, you need to FTP (or SFTP or SCP) your image files.

If Agaric set it up, just use the FTP login information we provided and drop the pictures in the directory you find yourself in, files/images/import

No need to even put them in a folder. Just upload all the pictures you want in one gallery together in one batch. (Do not include in the transfer pictures you want in different galleries or albums.)

Go to:
/admin/content/image_import

Pick a gallery.

They will be assimilated. (Agaric was called the borg recently.)

Before all of this, you will want to run the pictures through Gallery Mage or export from Apple's iPhoto or some-such-- not to produce thumbnails, you don't want to upload thumbnails, Drupal will make all that and more for you -- but you don't want your original size pictures to be 4MB each and about 50 screenfulls. 800 px by 600 px as the maximum sizes should be fine, or even 800 X 800.

You can rename pictures (so they aren't named DSC_0166.jpg and such). Hiding all titles with the Drupal module auto_nodetitle might also be a possibility.

Any questions, ask Agaric.