Alain Coadou is a water colour artist who works in the old village of Locronan, in the west of Brittany. Designed by PoleOuest, his portfolio implements Silverstripe content management framework along with our own modified jquery gallery module.

The image button on the tinymce instance of silverstripe html text fields is really nice and well layed out : it gives editors one of the best text / image integration, with a minimum user actions that’s both powerful, intuitive, and reactive thanks to AJAX calls to the folder structure.

One small drawback is that it comes with one small feature that can be annoying at times, especially when you’re looking for inserting images without resampling them, especially for transparent images or tight image integration / quality that Silverstripe resampling functions (PHP based) cannot match (check out the original image hack).

Image size limit feature

In silverstripe, when you select a big image, width and height are automatically resized to a maximum of 600 pixels. Quick hackers might want to deactivate this feature by commenting the resize algorithm in cms/code/ThumbnailStripField.php (lines 73/80 of 2.3 rc2).

But for those who want the best of both worlds (enjoy limitation AND allow original size), here is a hack that will allow editors to choose between the limited image size (max 600, very useful for huge uploads straight from high definition camera) and the original size (very useful for reasonable image size, like example here of 800). Next trick would be to allow editor to type in width and height with automatic calculation of the image proportion. We’re getting closer to photoshop indeed.

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The popularity of javascript lightboxes has spread over the internet and no serious webmaster could think of displaying images without a specific thumbnailer and / or a dynamic slider of popup. The author of jQuery.popeye had  seen enough lightboxes and decided to implement his own box that features the advantage of being integrated like an image, with comments written below and navigation buttons.

We have collected 2 javascript image addons that perform nice enhancements or animations on simple images

• Instant js is a  javascript library that adds visual effect to any image, just via a style sheet attribute. Wonderful and simple light javascript effect that saves you either photoshop or server processing time. link : http://www.netzgesta.de/instant/. 
• For Jquery addicts, here comes another nice effect : we call it  SlideText Gallery and it features a nice  image rollover that displays the alt text. Implemented for Silverstripe CMS experts (download zip for HasManyFileManager module),  inspiration : Kyanmedia.

Remember MonoSlideShow ? It’s worth its price but is being challenged by 2 javascript alternatives. Mootols and Jquery respectively handles nice image transitions with Ken Burns effect (Zoom-Translation combined movement) ,  via their SlideShow Class (Mootols) and CrossSlide plugin (Jquery). While the latter seems lighter, it offers the nice programmatic syntax to define exactly the level of zoom and time of transition for each image. The former has more options, such as a controller that mimics Monoslideshow’s own mimic. The fact that these two alternative to a flash commercial applet might decide you to make a smart choice between them ?

Is it necessary to build an alternative picasa viewer when picasa itself provides nice flash gallery viewers ? for webmasters it turns out that sometimes it can be necessary to hide picasa details, and thanks to picasa itself providing various remote server access, you can use your albums within any kind of rss or json enabled application. We provide here an example of a JSON - jquery powered slideshow that takes input from any picasa album. The advantage of using picasa over hosted or specific applications such as famous menalto’s gallery of coppermine is that picasa does resizing jobs for you, and offers up to 1 GB of free online image storage which largely enough for any small website presentation.

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Browser based image manipulation tools are getting wiser as javascript libraries get widespread. 2 Dutch students have set up the  Ajaxorized blog that features examples of automatic transition effects (scriptaculous based), 3d image reflection with javascript,  but also a javascript / PHP GD image manipulation tool that can rotate, resize, flip, and write on images with javascript functions !! Phototype is the name of this nice prototype based javascript library.

My last article on Silvesrtripe CMS online image editing feature led me to investigate alternative solution for websites and software developers that wish to implement this kind of component for their backoffice.. Surfing on CAKEPHP framework homepage turned out to illustrate perfectly the kind of component that should be standard on all CMS : resizing is now pretty common, and what we want now is cropping. There is actually a plugin for jquery that does the interface job, ImgAreaSelect. ImgAreaSelect come with loads of configuration options that make it a perfect tool for cropping images : the selection area is responsive, draggable, and can be adjusted to work only within specified limits or predefined aspect ratio. What’s missing in Jquery is the server side of things, and you’ll find that either on webmotionUK for pure PHP or on CAKEPHP’s site for Cake integration.

Sometimes, the most apparently useless feature is one that reveals great ambitions : In spite of its wonderful administration layout that is one of the most usable content management systems, we focus today on one aspect of Silverstripe Admin interface : the image editing feature.

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This great little free application focuses on one simple task : resize and optimize your pictures for web publishing. We got to use and became addict because of the very simple right click feature, which allows anyone to resize pictures just before sending them to the web, while browsing your workstation for the best illustration. as such it really is a producticvity tool, which also suports raw formats, such as canon’s cr2 !!

http://www.vso-software.fr/products/image_resizer/