Image Style Basics

Drupal offers the possibility to easily process images via image styles (formerly known as imagecache presets). In our current case of a photo heavy website we had to integrate a watermark image on all images supplied by the site. For this purpose we used the image style action Overlay (watermark).

The configuration of the style is really simple - but could be enriched with scaling and all other available actions.

A major advantage of using Drupal's built in image style is the fact that all images are only processed once and cached in Drupal's file system for later usage. In case of our image gallery the first call of the page would take a long time, because all thumbnails would be rendered for the first time. But on second call all images would be available immediately.