I’ve been checking out a pre-release version of ATImageEditor, a new Plone add-on product from Nathan Van Gheem of UW Oshkosh that lets you perform basic image editing tasks (crop, resize, etc.) directly inside of Plone.

This is one of the more impressive, immediately-useful-to-real-people add-on products I’ve seen in a while. I’ve lost count of the number of our Plone site administrators who don’t really know how to use image editing software like Photoshop, GIMP, etc. to crop and resize photos for use on the web. They’ve long been a bit frustrated by the fact that Plone doesn’t provide image-editing tools (it is, after all, content management software, not image editing software).

But, now, thanks to Nathan (and the power of JQuery & KSS, Plone’s built-in javascript UI framework!) Plone can serve as a basic image editor, and that’s all that many folks need.

(Here’s a quick 1-minute screencast of ATImageEditor in action.)

Overall, this an extremely impressive product, one that is sure to be a smash hit amongst everyday Plone users and integrators. It’s a tremendous boost to Plone’s “approachability,” which is one of the major strategic foci of the Plone platform development this year. I hope Nathan will continue to polish & refine it, and possibly propose it for inclusion in a future release of Plone (it’s non-invasive and won’t cause any backwards compatibility issues, which means it’d be a great shiny new feature for Plone 3.2!).

ATImageEditor is a “0.1rc2″ release right now, which means it’s still under active development, and probably not quite suitable for high-intensity production use. However, it’s not very invasive, and thus not very risky to install.

After testing it out a bit, I do have a short laundry list of comments and suggestions. I’m posting them here in order to shine a bit of light on this promising new product and to encourage you to give it a whirl and offer Nathan some feedback of your own.

• If versioning is enabled for Images, transforming the image doesn’t trigger a version to be saved. That would be nice, since it would effectively provide an “undo” feature.
• It’s not clear what the effect/purpose of “use zoom apparent” is.
• I would love to see the pixel measurements of the image while I’m zooming, cropping and resizing, if that’s possible.
• Can ATImageEditor register its javascripts with portal_javascripts so they can be merged, managed and cached effectively? I’m guessing Nathan intends to in a future iteration.
• Viewing the image after editing seems to have some lingering caching effects. (I seem to see the version-before-editing, from my browser cache. I’m not sure how to prevent this.)
• The flip/rotate controls are a lot more visually prominent, and yet probably not nearly as likely to be used, as the resize & crop controls. Save needs to be more prominent as well. Plone usually puts save buttons at the bottom, it might be good to be consistent.
• Maybe ImageEditor should warn the user if you try to leave the page without saving changes?
• Is it possible to include a control that would allow one to set the JPEG compression quality? We see a lot of novice users uploading images that aren’t compressed nearly hard enough, and being able to recompress natively in Plone would be a HUGE help. (Especially if there was an “undo” via versioning!)
• Plone already includes JQuery 1.2.6; you shouldn’t need to load provide it again. Or maybe register it yourself only if ImageEditor is being installed in a Plone older than 3.1.x (whichever version includes JQuery 1.2.6) That will save ~101kb of page load.
• It might be good to name this product to Products.ImageEditor — putting it in the Products.* namespace means that you don’t have to declare it as an egg (easier to install!) and naming products “AT” is strongly discouraged, since it is meaningless to most people, especially newbies. (Note: this is irrelevant if you wind up PLIPing it for a future version of Plone, in which case it would likely become plone.app.imageditor.)
• If ATImageEditor eventually ships with Plone out of the box, it would probably be reasonable to jam the editing controls into the edit tab, rather than in a separate visual transform tab.

Whew!  That’s it!  Bravo, Nathan!  This is a great product, and I can’t wait to see it continue to develop and mature!