Adding Pictures to a Picture Library via a VS2010 Module

Scenario

• You would like to add some Images to an existing Image Library in your SharePoint site using a Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Project.
• You do this by following these steps.
• Add a module to the project
• Rename the module to the Image Library name
• Set the module tag's url and path properties to the Image Library name
• Leaving spaces in place
• Ex: <Module Name="Recipe Pics" Path="Recipe Pics" Url="Recipe Pics">
• Add the images to the module using Visual Studio Solution Explorer's "add existing item" option
• Add the Type="GhostableInLibrary" tag to the Elements.xml tag for each image
• Ex: <File Path="FriedOkra.jpg" Url="FriedOkra.jpg" Type="GhostableInLibrary"/>
• Run the project to deploy the solution
• This should run without errors

Issue

• The images are in the Image Library, but the thumbnails on the list view and the item views are missing.  The Item view displays icjpg.gif instead.
• This issue is also documented on Eugene Rosenfeld's blog.

Resolution

• Check-out and check-in each image you just added
• This creates the appropriate thumbnails, but this is a manual process and will be wiped out next time you redeploy the module
• One option is to add a feature that will check out and in each image.  An alternative is to add the thumbnails directly to the module, although this has 1 issue as outlined below.
• To add the thumbnails to the module, follow these steps
• On the Image List's default view page you should see the "t" thumbnails for your images
• Save each "t" thumbnail to disk in an "_t" subfolder
• Replace any Html Encoding with the original characters
• Change %20 to a space 
• Click on each image's view page and you should see the "w" thumbnail
• Save each "w" thumbnail to disk in an "_w" subfolder
• Replace any Html Encoding with the original characters
• Change %20 to a space
• Issue: The "_w" images do not work correctly in 2010 with this method.  They are uploaded, but the default item view will not display them.
• Add _w and _t folders to your module in Visual Studio
• Add existing items to each module folder from the above subfolders
• Add the Type="GhostableInLibrary" tag to the Elements.xml tag for each thumbnail image