Image attach

The Image attach module is included in the Image download. Since we've already installed and configured that module, we just need to visit Administer | Site building | Modules (at /admin/build/modules) and activate the Image attach module.

This will allow us to attach image nodes to any other type of content. For the purpose of this project, we will use the Story type content, which is built-in and active by default on all Drupal sites. For a more complex solution, we would probably build our own type with multiple image fields (which we'll do in the next chapter). But we would still be able to use this module with those types, if it were the best solution.

Attaching Images to Content

Now we are ready for our editors to actually begin attaching the images. As with images, you may wish users with an editor role to be able to create stories on the site by assigning that permission at Administer | User management | Permissions (at /admin/user/permissions). Users in this example must have both the permission to create story content and to create image content.

Putting on our editor hat, we go to Create content | Create Story (at /node/add/story). We'll add a juicy title, the body content of our article, and then open the fieldset that reads Attached images:

We can go ahead and insert an existing image that's been uploaded to the site from the Existing Image drop-down selector, or we can upload a new image directly from this form. In our example, we'll upload our new image here, hit Save, and see the new image magically float into our content!

Navigating back to our home page, we'll see the new image as a teaser thumbnail for our new story as well:

Note that you may not want editors to be able to attach existing images to content. For instance, if you have a site with multiple uses of image nodes, such as with a gallery, it may get too confusing to keep them sorted. On the other hand, note also that image nodes created with Image attach will automatically be marked as not published and so they will not show up for users except as an attached image.

To disable the option to attach existing images, navigate to Administer | Site configuration | Images | Image attach (at/admin/settings/image/image_attach).

You may wish to change the placement of the attached image. For the most part, you'll need to change your theme's stylesheet to do this. The Image attach module automatically floats attached images to the right using its image_attach.css file. We'll learn more about overriding stylesheets in later chapters.