Being able to accurately control the size and dimensions of images is vital for any modern website. Nowdays, different media types are commonplace because broadband has become ubiquitous. Because of this, websites have the opportunity to show off far superior and more interesting pages to the average visitor. But being able to handle images on the fly is not something that is necessarily too easy to do - unless you have a well designed web platform.

Drupal 6 requires us to make use of the excellent ImageCache contributed module in order to properly apply effects and styles to class of images. Site prebuilder distributions all come with this module built in and as of Drupal 7, much of this functionality is included in core (about time).

Here's how it works:

This preset is now available pretty much anywhere images are displayed in Drupal. You can apply it to images in content and views quite easily. For example, let's assume that you needed the 200px width preset to apply to all images shown in blog posts:

Now any blog images are displayed using the assigned ImageCache preset. In the same way, images in Views can be controlled by configuring the display options in the field outputs for any images shown. A good example of this are the two blog posts shown in the right hand column of the Site prebuilder website.