Drupal Photoshelter and Feeds

I don'tt know how many of the photographers at Photoshelter use Drupal as backbone for their website, but I have been a long time user of Drupal and Photoshelter but never really harnessed the power of either one. In my new design (or rather upgrade) of my website www.aurora.is I decided on getting more out of Photoshelter and integrate it a bit better with my site. 

One of the things I did was bringing out the power of the feeds module to pul inn content. Feeds is a powerful module that can be used in many ways both for rss feeds and to get content by xml or csv into your site.

There where some tricks that I had to play out to get it all to fit well and to snap the images from the rss feeds. I had tried some modules to grab the images but was not getting the result I needed. I therefore turned to Feeds_tamper to help me out.

Here is how I did it.

I created a gallery at Photoshelter called new images.

I then created a new content type photoshelter-feed and added the field of taxanomy to that content type.

Next I created a feed importer with the settings needed to create a feed of the content type photoshleter-feed.

I mapped title to title, description to body and tags to my taxonomy vocabulary Photography.

Then came the tricky part.

When the feeds are pulled in your name, like tis -" by Kristjan Logason" ,is appended to the name of the images. This I wanted out.

Further more in the body along with the images come copyright informations and link to your site and images.

As the image is directly linked to the site and I was only going to have them served on the front page (for now) I wanted all text gone and only the image to be used.

That is where Feeds_tamper came in. By using feeds tamper I could do three things.

A. remove my name from the title.

B. Remove all text from the body

C. Explode the keywords into my existing taxonomy vocabulary.

On the front page I am using the power of Views and Panels to serve the front. I created a view to serve 4 images that I then placed in a pane on the font page, and voila 4 thumbs with direct link to the images are served up.

Now when ever I throw a new image into this gallery it popps up on the front of my homepage.

There is lot more to be done but those addons will come one step at a time. 

If you have any questions regarding more details of the work do not hesitate to contact me. I'm no master at Drupal but what I have gone through might help.