The perfect holiday is a dash of consumerism, plenty of family, great food and a dash of snow. The key is to get the right balance.

One of the things that bothers me most about the current set of Content Management Systems out there is their inability to handle image resizing in a automated, yet still customized manner. On most systems, thumbnails are created in a very canned process, leaving you with limited sizing options and no re-composition features. Why should we settle on a downsized image of 250 pixels if we want something more suited to our site’s layout.

There are three folds to this problem; the ability for the CMS to handle thumbnails for navigation purposes, the ability to create thumbnails of a custom size, and the ability to create composed squares.

The problem with most programs out there is that they are optimized for text and not images. There isn’t often an easy way to create a navigational thumbnail framework for your site without resorting to adding custom fields for the inclusion of thumbnails and installing various plugins. I want to be able to create and use thumbnails in the CMS in various ways; to show off in my archive, to navigate my most recent images and also to create mobile friendly versions of my site (more on this in an upcoming post). It is really that difficult to have an on-switch for visual navigation and archiving?

For image savvy publishers, size does matter. Currently, in most systems, you need to upload images to the exact size you want. In some cases, the program will create a thumbnail for you, in a defaulted thumbnail size, which may or may not be suitable for the layout of your site. In an ideal system, I would want to be able to upload a batch of images at their highest resolution, for print and sell options (more on that later), and be able to customize 3 or 4 resizing options; creating smaller images for full width individual posts, thumbnails for navigation and an optimized version for mobile viewing and rss. The key point here is being able to assign user designated values for the maximum dimension of each resize process and outcome, instead of settling for limited default settings.

Lastly, I want to focus on squares. The square is often the best presentation format to showcase a variety of thumbnails in a consistent manner, regardless of the shape of the original image. It’s an easy way to create a uniform stream. The problem with most systems is that they don’t know how to crop images to their ultimate square. If you look at flickr, the squares are automatically generated to create a set of thumbnails. In most cases, this is sufficent, but in some cases, the process crops out important features in the original image. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could slightly adjust some of these squares? One of the best solutions I have seen is in the facebook profile picture feature. Once your image is uploaded, the system also created a square icon for use on the site. However, if you face isn’t quite centred, the system allows you to make subtle shifts in the composition and saves that change. Why can all thumbnails be that composed? If you want to take it one step further, it would be nice if the system could also allow you to zoom in on a portion of the image to create the square thumbnail, but that might be asking for too much. Back when I had a photoblog with square thumbnail navigation, I always had to upload and create my own thumbnails to each image. Hopefully in the future, we won’t have to subject ourselves to this process.

This is part of a series of posts I am writing, about creating a Image Content Management System.

Sure it is great to see different images evolve on someone’s photoblog over the years, but as time passes, trends emerge and you find yourself drawn to shooting similar things, creating these cohesive bodies of work, from what would seem is a random stream of images. But this isn’t just important to create a series, but sometimes it’s just a great way to group images from a certain event.

On route to SXSW interactive 2004, I had this conversation with Matt Mullenweg during a Houston Blogger Meet. I told him how I wanted to be able to categorize my images, as I was doing with my photoblog, but also be able to navigate back and forth through each category from picture to picture. At the time, I could only navigate chronologically through my site based on posting sequence, but not by category. Now you are probably thinking, that’s totally possible, as flickr allows you to surf from picture to picture within a set or within a group, despite it’s order on your stream. You have to remember though, that when I had this conversation, flickr had just launched the month prior, and was nowhere near being the photo sharing site it is today. Also flickr isn’t necessarily ideal if you are trying to build your own web presence.

So there the idea remained, lost in a bar at Houston, but it always stayed as a wishlist feature I wanted to have in whatever CMS I was using for posting my images. The closest thing coming to this was when Typepad launched and had galleries featured in the system. Blogware and Vox also had similiar features, which was a great little addition to blogging CMSs in general, but in terms of having a regular stream that integrated with the gallery, it wasn’t the ideal solution.

The key thing here, that I want to impose is the ability to upload individual images in a main stream, while having the flexibility to tag or categorize as such, so that it appears in the system in different ways. Thus giving the publisher the ability to simply create various galleries or sets, independant or codependent from each other in the system. A virtual lightbox where you can file away the images you upload as you please and present it in various ways but simply tagging.

In my ideal CMS, uploading of images could be done individually or in batches, where each image would have it’s own individual page with or without descriptions, comments or other data, based on user preference. In a blog setting, these images can naturally form a stream by chronology or can be called upon within a gallery or set, based on user set tags, as well as still remain in stream. Perhaps there would be images that would be included in a gallery, but not the mainstream. The big idea is that there isn’t a stream at all, just a pool of images, and a mere tag that would identify the image as being a part of the regular stream, a gallery or set or all. The CMS would hold all your images in archive, only to appear to the viewer, when and where you choose for them to publish on your site.

UPDATE: Giving this some more thought, it would be best to be able to mark each image with both a tag and a stream. Above, I used the terms very loosely and interchange their usage, when in fact they are two different things in my mind. A tag, being keywords used by the user, so the images can be searched within the pool. A stream being the various places where the images will be published, whether that be a main blog, gallery or series.

This is part of a series of posts I am writing, about creating a Image Content Management System.