SharePoint: Site Collection Images vs Images vs Style Library Images

Something I've been wondering. Is there a best practice or rule of thumb on how to store your images? I see 3 ways currently:

• Site Collection Images
• Images library
• Style Library/Images

My rule of thumb has been: if you have only 1 site collection for your project, then use the Site Collection Images. Otherwise, create a folder structure like: /Style Libra开发者_开发问答ry//images.

What is the difference between Site Collection images and the Images library?

Images lib provides a thumb view by default while the Style lib/images just treat images as files. Site collection images? I think it's just another name of the Style lib/images of the top site.

Site Collection Images is a carry-over document library from the 2007 Publishing Feature. It's a document library but with multiple content types assigned to it (Image, Audio, Video). There's a thumbnail view associated with some of the content types so you get a nice preview of an image.

Images is a new library called and Asset library but in reality and behind the scenes, it's exactly the same as the old Site Collection Images document library with the three custom content types assigned to it. The only difference I can see is the icon used for the library.

Style Library is just a regular document library with no content types associated with it. It's created as part of the Publishing feature and pre-populated with some basic images, css files, and xsl style sheets (that are used with the DataView Web Part).

My standard (if you want to call it that is this).

A new folder for your site in the Style Library (sitename) with subfolders of "css", "js", and "img". The reason for this naming is that some libraries, plugins, and other addons will look for this type of structure (with CSS doing a relative path to an "img" folder to look for images). So it keeps things compact and identifable.

I choose to put CSS, JavaScript and Images here rather than creating separate libraries for it all. CSS is for (obviously) style sheets. JS is for javascript. This would include jquery (in the root js folder) or jQuery plugins (in a separate folder for each plugin). IMG is for CSS icons, system icons (e.g. twitter badges, etc.). I find this layout just handy and doesn't hurt anything keeping it all together.

I put regular photo content into Site Collection Images since a) it gets automatically populated when you create a publishing site or activate the feature and b) it's easy to find when inserting pictures into a rich content field. I'll just hide or tell the users to ignore the Images library (it can't be deleted because it's part of the Publishing Feature).

Hope that helps. YMMV.

I'd add that the style library is also different in that it's contents are readable by all users even if you have removed their permissions to the library or an item within the library.