First evaluation of Drupal

The question this week is about how well drupal might meets my needs in producing an online digital collection. From this week's exercises, I am far from expert in this area - just a novice, really, so take it all with a grain of salt, just as I do right now. Still there are general impressions and it can be good to have fresh eyes looking at a situation or proposed solution for a problem such as this one.

Drupal is not hard to install at all. Once you have the basics figured out, one can get drupal running. I have not configured it to run connected to the internet, but I'm hoping that would not be too difficult. On the other hand, I find the interface to be pretty clunky compared to what I am used to using in terms of software. You have to know where you are going and what you are doing or you may not get there or get it done. It would be nice to have something like an inspector window that allows easier navigation through the drupal features and interfaces. It isn't really that hard to do things, but I don't like having to click back and forth - in and out to do things that are within the context of the window I'm currently in.

As far as displaying digital images, drupal surprised me by not choking on some of the file formats I threw at it. It handled my DNG RAW format fairly well. It didn't know to rotate the preview, which is actually an embedded JPEG, but that's no big deal, really. I think that imageMagic or some other plugin could take care of that problem. It did get to be a hassle to have to add various common image formats to the list of importable items, but I suppose once you got the hang of that, you could always anticipate it ahead of time.

It does seem that there are so many easy ways to display galleries of images out there though. I wonder if there might be better Content Management Systems that have taken a cue from such gallery software available from Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, et al. If not, I think there should be. I've brought up the topic of being able to leverage the embedded metadata in images for use in these galleries before and I'll beat the drum again. The model of having to move metadata around separately from the image files themselves just strikes me as primitive and inefficient. Something I'm going to have to look into a lot more, I suppose.