Image Management in eZ Publish

I have a number of projects on at the moment which involve managing media types and providing editing facilities for the managed assets. Whilst the built-in image management tools in eZ are great for resizing images and the like, they don’t provide for dynamically allowing the users to crop images to preset sizes or the like.

I have surveyed the scene in regards to image management available through PHP/JS and found the Javascript Image Cropper UI by David Spurr. This cool little utility is built on the Prototype and script.aculo.us libraries and has an array of functions for cropping images. The utility itself does not perform the cropping or image management on the server side, but allows the user to interactively choose what they would like done, with the coordinates and related variables being available for passing into whatever script you decide to integrate.

I am going to look at developing a new datatype for eZ over the coming day or two utilising this utility to provide cropping functionality and the ability to create versions/derivative images from the original upload.

As more information becomes available I will let you know and will likely release the results as a contribution to the eZ community.