Create an album based image gallery in Drupal 6 using CCK and views

This tutorial is an addition to my previous tutorial on creating a simple gallery in Drupal 6 using CCK and views.  This tutorial will enable users to create galleries containing multiple images per node with each album being listed within a view presented by one of the node’s images.

This tutorial was written with the following versions of Drupal and module:

• Drupal 6.11
• CCK (Content Construction Kit) 6.x-2.2
• Views 6.x-2.5
• Filefield 6.x-3.0
• Imagefield 6.x-3.0
• ImageAPI 6.x-1.6
• Imagecache 6.x-2.0-beta9
• Lightbox2 6.x-1.9

Note: These were the latest versions as of writing this tutorial.

Installation

Install Drupal as normal and extract each of the modules to /sites/all/modules directory.

Navigate to /admin/build/modules and enable the following modules:

• Content
• Filefield
• Imagefield
• ImageAPI
• ImageAPI GD2 (unless your server is configured for Imagemagick, then enable the ImageMagick module instead)
• ImageCache
• ImageCache UI
• Lightbox2
• Views
• Views UI

Once you have ticked all the modules, press Save configuration.

Imagecache

You may wish to create more presets, but for this tutorial we will just create 2, a thumbnail for each image and a larger lightbox image.

Navigate to /admin/build/imagecache and click Add new preset.

Set the preset Namespace to thumbnail. Click Add Scale and Crop, set the width to 300 and the height to 200.

Then create a new imagecache preset with the name lightbox. This time select Add Scale and set the width to 800 and the height to 600.

CCK Imagefield

We will need to create a content type that we will use for our albums.  To keep this simple, I am calling mine Album with the machine name album.

Navigate to /admin/content/types and click Add content type.

Under Submission form settings, set the Title field name to Album name and set the Body field label to description.

Save the content type.

Next to the Album content type click manage fields. In the Add New field area, set the label to Images and the field name to images (to make it field_images), for the Type of data to store, select File then for Form element select Image.  Press Save.

You may need to set the Permitted upload file extensions.  By default mine was set to txt.  Change this to jpg gif jpeg png.

Under Global settings, tick the Required box and set the Number of values to Unlimited.  Leave the List field disabled and set the Description field to Enabled.

Then press the Save field settings button.

Now click the Display fields tab at the top of the page.

Set the Label to Hidden and set both the Teaser and Full node to Lightbox2: thumbnail->lightbox.

Now under /node/add/album we can add some images to go in to our album.

For now create 3 or 4 albums.

Under /admin/content/node you should now have some nodes.

Views

Navigate to /admin/build/views and click the Add tab at the top of the page.  Set the view name to something like albums, leave the View type set to node and click Next.

Set the title to Albums. For Style set to Grid then chose 3 columns and set Alignment to Horizontal.

For Use pager set to Full pager.  Then for Items per page, set to a multiple of 3, I am going to use 9 to give us a 3×3 grid of images. If you wish, you can set Use AJAX to Yes to stop the whole page being loaded on the pager.

Add the following Filters:

• Node: Published = On
• Node: Type = Album

Under Fields select Content: Images (field_images), Node: Body and  Node: Title.

Set Label to None and change Format to thumbnail image and set the Show value to 1 value. Tick the box that says Link this field to its node, this will allow the image to be clickable. Press Update.

For node body, delete the text in the Label field and press Update.  If you have used long descriptions for your albums, you may wish to use the Trim this field to maximum length to limit the length of the description.

For title, delete the Label text and tick the box next to Link this field to its node, press Update.

At the moment Drupal has these fields in the wrong order, so you will need to click the up and down arrow next to the + button on fields.

And reorder the fields in to the following order: Image –> Title –> Body or if you wish you can keep them how they are.

Under Relationships, click the + button and select Content: Images (field_images) – fid.

Tick the box that says Require this relationship and set the Delta to 1.  This will check to make sure that the album contains at least 1 image.  Setting Delta to all will result in odd behaviour in the album due to duplicates.

If you wish you can add some sort criteria so that the newest albums appear first etc.

On the left select Page from the drop down and click Add display.

Under Path set to albums.

Press Save.

Now if you navigate to /albums you can see your gallery in action.

For your album nodes, you can modify them however you want to get the display you are looking for, whether you use Panels or create a custom node-album.tpl.php is up to you.

Update: I have now written a tutorial on creating a grid of images within an album using the node-album.tpl.php method.