One of the often-quote reasons why people use K2 over Joomla articles is the in-built support for article and category images. Who knew Joomla articles and categories have the same thing? Not me until this week when I was converting my Contented PDF extension to be compatible with Joomla content items.

Here is a very quick guide so that those who are using Contented PDF  can add images that will show in their PDF reports, and generally those who just want to add images to their Joomla content items.

Categories

You can add a category image through the Basic option menu (It's on the right in 2.5). Browse to an existing image or upload a new one through the modal media manager that opens up

Displaying the category image

As with most things Joomla, there's several ways of doing this. I did it through the category options on the Category blog menu item I was using

Adding an article image: Intro and Fulltext

Joomla allows you to add an article image and for it to differ depending on whether you have a read more within you content. Just add an existing image or upload a new one and select it in the modal media manager that opens

Having the image appear

My article images appeared without having to change any default settings. If you want to change how and where the image appears you can use the Image float control within the article (or set the default within the Article Manager default options

How does Contented PDF use these images?

The default order of images for display in Contented PDF is as follows:

1. Checks if there is an article introtext image
2. If none, checks if there is a fulltext image
3. If not, checks if there is an image for the category the article belongs to
4. If none, it uses the default image set in the Contented PDF module preferences