image_picker

A simple, customizable image browser.

Installation

Install the gem directly:

gem sources -a http://gems.github.com (you only have to do this once)
sudo gem install pelargir-image_picker

Or install the gem in your Rails project as a plugin:

script/plugin install git://github.com/pelargir/image_picker.git

Or clone the project:

git clone git://github.com/pelargir/image_picker.git

Then copy the required image, JS, and CSS files into your Rails project

rake image_picker:install_files

Usage

First, add the picker to your view and pass it the name of the image being picked. This name is used to create a hidden field that stores the database ID of the image that gets picked:

<%= image_picker :avatar %>

Now tell your controller that you’ll be picking images, and which ActiveRecord model you’ll be using:

class SomeController < ActionController::Base
  image_picker :model => Image
end

The ActiveRecord class must respond to three method calls:

thumbnail: the path to the image's thumbnail (e.g. /images/foo_small.gif)
title: a friendly title for the image
description: a description of the image (optional)

That’s it! The picker will show up in your view and, once you’ve picked an image, its database ID will be set as the value of the hidden field “<name>_id” where <name> is the name you passed to the image_picker helper in your view. The hidden field can then be submitted via a form or referenced in JavaScript.

Other Options

The controller helper accepts any arguments you can pass to an ActiveRecord finder. For example:

class SomeController < ActionController::Base
  image_picker :model => Image, :order => "created_at DESC"
end

If the will_paginate plugin is installed, the image picker will use it automatically. You can pass pagination options to the controller helper as well. For example:

class SomeController < ActionController::Base
  image_picker :model => Image, :per_page => 6
end

Resources

Repository: github.com/pelargir/image_picker/ Blog: matthewbass.com Author: Matthew Bass

Extraction work sponsored by Terralien