Handling Images?

[7724]

Hi Guys,

PHP is great and I am getting on well creating sites with it using various features, but the one thing I always get stuck on every time I am building something new in php is assigning images with story records.

The way I currently do it is one of three ways:

1) On my site that I built when I had no php knowledge I used a content management system called PROPS which has an image handler. You simply upload a photo to a folder and when you get around to adding a story it somehow allows you to click on a javascript link which brings up a new pop-up window and you can just click on the image and then it's assigned with that story when you hit save.

2) Next way I did it was to create a upload section where you upload an image to a folder and you also give that image a name.

The name you have given the image and the image .jpg reference details are then held in a table with a record number. The name of the images are simply called into a dropdown menu where I can pick the image I want to assign with each story from the dropdown - save the record and then I just echo the picture <img src="../images/<?php echo"$picture"; ?>" > for each story record on my template page

3) The other way I have done it is to upload an image to a folder and simply remember what I have called the image - ie image.jpg and type that information into a textbox when I am adding a story record.

Trouble is option 1 is too complicated to reproduce something similar like PROPS image handler.

Option 2 works great but could get complicated when you get over 50 of images in the dropdown menu.

Option 3 is a bit basic and if you want to use the image again in a later story you may forget what you called it!!

So Can I just pick people’s brains to ask how you handle images with stories?

Thanks

[bpat1434]

Currently I'm working on adding this functionality to my site, but I'm gonna take you through what I will most likely use.

Since your stories possibly will use a database, then each story should have it's own unique ID number. So with that unique ID number, you'll associate this image in the database. You'll upload the photo via the script, and give them the option of what position they want the photo. I'm only going to allow 3 images to be uploaded, so they can choose position 1,2, or 3. Then you save the position in the database as well. Then when you need to call the images, you can call the rows where the image is associated with the story ID.

It's a little confusing, but it makes sense (as oxymoronic as that sounds). Here's a more interesting look:
http://www.bpatterson.net/photo_db.jpg

Hope that helps you.

~Brett

[7724]

Thanks,

That makes sense and is very useful. Just wondering about existing images though. Say a photo has already been uploaded and you want to use it again for a new story - how would you get the system to show that photo so they can choose it with the story?

[bpat1434]

find the image, and then just add the story id as a csv (comma seperated value) in the story_id row. Then you just modify the SELECT statement to include all rows where the story id is in the array of the database.

~Brett