What would make a good image plugin?
July 15, 2008 9:56 am Blog Meta, Daily Image, ECMA / Javascript, General Interest, Miscellaneous, Picture Links, Programming, Tools and Libraries, Web and Web Standards, Word PressI’ve been thinking about making an image plugin for WordPress. I want to restart my image of the day process, but the import process has been dreadful, and there’s no programmatic access to the image list, meaning things like random images and images from subgroups aren’t particularly reasonable. To that end I need to write my own, and since I’d love the rank that comes from having a high-usage plugin, I need a clear idea of what things go into an image plugin, what features are missing from existing plugins, et cetera.
I’m already doing complex efficient randomization, API access, bulk posting, timed bulk posting, base autotagging, auto-categorization, a catalog widget, and I’m going to make sure that my stuff is compatible with the All In One SEO pack. I’m going to provide integration points, and I’m going to provide an example integration with LightBox, or one of its relatives. I’m going to provide voting, moderated tag suggestion and home-post permalinking.
I’ll also be writing strict, browser/version portable code without hacks. Yay!
Please let me know what you’d want to see if there were a new image plugin coming out.
July 15th, 2008 at 10:01 am
i would like to see a way to customize the way the output looks. like gallery templates or something. instead of being stuck with whatever most authors come up with. most of what i do i try and make flow with the rest of the website the best i can and the more i can customize something to fit the look and feel of my website, the better it is to me. other than that i cant think of doing anything that others don’t already do.
July 15th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Thank god. About time somebody made a useful image plugin for WordPress. Cheers!
May 30th, 2009 at 3:05 am
Did you ever write the plugin?
Most people using WordPress are using shared hosts. They will probably have lots of disk quota, but limited compute, so this influences your design descisions.
Thinks I dislike about the default WordPress image handling.
* images are uploaded one at a time through a browser interface (slow, inefficient for more than a couple of photos).
* images are resized once (when uploaded) to thumbnail, medium, and original sizes. Too bad if you want to change the size of your thumbnails.
* no way to watermark images.
If I was running a photo-based blog, I would like a plugin that had these features.
* is based on folders/directories, so I can upload a large number of photos all at once via FTP.
* I can choose to run batch process to re-size all my images from the original if I decide that I want thumbnail sizes to be different etc. Due to limited compute, I don’t want a plugin that resized an image from the original every time it is viewed.
* I can run a batch process to add a watermark to all photos. Resized and watermarked photos are stored in a separate directory, so if I choose to use a different watermark, I can just run the watermark/resize batch job again.
* watermarking should be optional. I might want to watermark my own photos, but not images that I have reposted from elsewhere.
Cheers,
Stu
June 1st, 2009 at 7:31 pm
No, I didn’t: nobody ever gave me any good ideas.
That just changed. Thank you.