The image editor

Exponential has an image editor inside the edit form. When you edit an item with an image field, you can crop, rotate, flip and resize the image, change its brightness and contrast, make it black and white or sepia, pixelate or blur a part of it, and add a watermark, without leaving the administration. SVG drawings can be edited too, and an empty image field can start a new drawing.

Two editors, one for each kind of administration

Only one of the two can be active on a site, because both draw the same button in the image field. A new installation made with the setup wizard or the kickstarter activates expimageeditor.

Your changes stay in your draft

The editor works on the image of your draft. Save stores the result as the image of the draft, and the form shows the new image at once. The published version keeps its own image until you publish the draft. Cancel leaves the draft as it was. See Editing an image for the tools.

Setting it up

For administrators. expimageeditor ships with Exponential, inside the kernel's repository, and is off until it is activated.

1. In settings/override/site.ini.append.php, add ActiveExtensions[]=expimageeditor under [ExtensionSettings], and remove or comment out ActiveExtensions[]=ezie.
2. Give editors the policy expimageeditor/edit in their role. Administrators with all rights have it. Without it the Edit image button is not shown.
3. Regenerate the autoloads and clear the caches.

[ExtensionSettings]
#ActiveExtensions[]=ezie
ActiveExtensions[]=expimageeditor

php bin/php/ezpgenerateautoloads.php -e
php bin/php/ezcache.php --clear-tag=ini
php bin/php/ezcache.php --clear-tag=template

Requirements: an admin design of Admin 4, the form token extension ezformtoken (the save request carries the form token), GD on the server (a saved raster image is decoded and written anew, so only its pixels are stored) and a current browser. Its settings are in expimageeditor.ini [EditorSettings]: the types it may store, the JPEG and WebP quality, the largest image (25 megapixels, 20 MB), the size of a new drawing, the crop ratios, the watermark images and the fonts.

ezie is installed with Exponential as well. To use it in the classic admin designs, activate ezie instead of expimageeditor. It needs GD2 or ImageMagick and the Zeta Components image conversion.

What can go wrong

• There is no Edit image button. Your role lacks expimageeditor/edit, the field holds no image yet (then New SVG drawing may appear instead), or your administration design is not Admin 4.
• Save is refused. The message names the reason: the image is too large, its type may not be stored, or the draft is not yours. An SVG stays an SVG and a raster image stays a raster image.
• A GIF came back as a PNG. GIF is not among the shipped output types, so it is saved as PNG and an animation is lost.

Read more

• Editing an image
• Adding custom watermarks
• Images, media and uploads, in the help center.