After designing and theming with Drupal for almost a year and a half, I realize now that if there is one thing that is not easy with Drupal, it's creating Image Galleries.

I now know many ways to create image galleries (image, image_gallery, imagefield, views, etc. etc. etc.), but none of them feels to me like the ideal solution. The way I see it, Drupal does not have a "proper" image gallery module. And more important, none of them are user-friendly enough.

I've been thinking about how we could use the node system to create image galleries, where images could be re-used, categorized, organized... and how to make all this easier for the end user. After sharing these ideas with the Raincity folks, I came up with this outline for a new, flexible Drupal-native image gallery system.