Forum
Best Practice / Advice for Property Website Images and Buckets
Hi
I'm currently working on a website for a estate agent and am wondering what your thoughts were for the management of the images?
Each property will have around 10 images and just uploading them into a "forsale" bucket will get messy.
Is there a way of dynamically creating a bucket for each property or how have other people managed the assets when there are a lot of images that also could be called the same (eg living room, bedroom etc)?
Many thanks
Glen
PS - I haven't used the Gallery add-on yet but can that be linked to the property admin page/template so the client doesn't have to keep switching between the two?
I haven't tried this Glen, but what if you passed something unique from the template into the bucket name?
So as an example and for arguments sake, you have a property_id (something that would be different each time).
Then you might be able to pass this name in as the bucket name like so?
As I said, I have not tried this so not sure if it would work or not? Perhaps setup a test and see if you can generate unique bucket names with this approach.
In regards to the gallery, I am not sure this will be supported/enhanced in the future, I stayed away from it for my last project and instead I used collections. As there is more control over the output and filtering and you can actually link collections to pages (so they appear like regions).
In fact collections might be the an option for the images/buckets too with repeaters.
Collections are only available with Runway though. But for an estate agent site, probably best to be delivered with Runway.
hope this might help.
Terry
That won't work - you can only nest tags that a processed in different parse phases, e.g. a content tag inside a form tag.
I don't think there's a good way to create dynamic buckets at the moment. It's a slightly tricky issue as not all of the types of storage file system we support use directories. For example, an Amazon S3 bucket is flat - you can't create subdirectories.
What's the motivation behind needing to have them organised in a certain way? From our point of view the CMS is taking over the management of those files - it's not something you should need or want to worry about.
Thanks Guys
The reason behind it is because each property will have around 10 photos. So when it comes to selecting the photo to use there will be potentially 100's of photos when the assets side panel slides in.
In an ideal world there would be a bucket for each property so when the client is on the admin page editing the property, when they go to select a photo to use the only photos that display in the assets side panel are for that property.
Also chances are the photos will be saved the same so we could end up having several photos saved as "living room" or "kitchen"
Glen
Ah, ok, so it's more a case of needing to group the assets within the UI. I don't think buckets are necessarily the answer there, as your list would soon get unmanageably long.
Where are the images coming from? Perch parses all the file metadata and applies any saved keywords, which you can then search on.
To get things going we've got a dozen or so properties to put on, after that then it's the client who will upload them so I'm guessing straight from the camera, or from camera to PC then Perch.
Can keywords be included in the image tag? keywords="<perch:content id="address" type="text">" for example?
Keywords/tags are assigned to the asset rather than the content. If they're in the image file already (as happens when exporting from an image management app) then Perch will read them in. Otherwise they can be added from the Assets app.
I'm not sure I have a good solution for you right now, but this is something we're working on for Perch 2.9, so it's all valuable feedback.
Ok - thanks for all your help.
So if they add say the property address or reference number as a tag, they can then do a search using the address / reference?
Yes, that's right.