Drupal and TIFFs
I’ve been working on a prototype using Drupal for digital library content but one major issue I’m encountering is how Drupal deals with TIFFs. Drupal documentation is at best spotty and it is difficult sometimes to determined if modules (Image or ImageField) support TIFFs. What I’d like to be able to do is use FileField (since ImageField upon testing doesn’t support TIFFs) to add TIFFs and then convert these into JPEGs. After about 2 days of digging, I haven’t found an answer. ImageCache would be perfect, except it doesn’t deal with TIFFs. It seems like ImageMagick is capable of changing TIFFs into JPEGs but this hasn’t been integrated into Drupal as far as I can tell.
So I’ve reached a stalemate at this point. Does anyone out there have experience with making Drupal play nice with TIFFs?
drupal interacts with the gd library, which is a lot like imagemagick. email me and we can figure out a solution.
IMO it’s not wise to put archival tifs on the webserver. It would be an unnecessary burden on the webserver to convert tifs to jpgs on the fly for a digital collections site. I would suggest converting them to jpg or png, then uploading the images to your records. From there you can let ImageCache do its thing!
Thanks for your comment. One reason we are thinking about putting the TIFFs on the webserver is so library staff can easily access them in order fulfill patron requests. Now there is a convoluted process by which Special Collection has to match up the public image with an archival TIFF stored somewhere else and then send it off.
I’m less interested in on the fly conversion so much as automatically creating a companion JPEG when the archival TIFF is uploaded and attached to its metadata. If we don’t do the conversion as part of the upload process then it will have to be done in batch beforehand which I’m not sure staff would be happy about.
I’m working on the same task. Converting TIFF to JPEG. We need people to review the images, so we are using a conversion process. Sadly, we have not found a proper solution either.
I will post back her if I figure out a way to do this.
anyone made any progress on this yet ? i badly need tiff for a ERP solution based on drupal
KarenS ? Someone?
Unfortunately, we went in a different direction and decided to not to do the TIFF to JPG conversion on the web server. Instead we made a field for the TIFF (using filefield) and one for the JPG (imagefield).
It’s a bit late, I know, but the Media Mover module is ideal for this… you could create a FileField for the TIFF, and then setup Media Mover to generate a JPEG and place it into an ImageField whenever the node is saved/updated. Once the JPEG is in the ImageField, you get all the ImageField benefits (ImageCache integration, etc).