[ale] Photo Management

[John]

My photo collection seems tiny by comparison. Sadly, I doubt I can help 
much, but some of this information would be helpful for others trying to 
help you.
- which file formats?  RAW, JPG, PNG, GIF?
- Any specific tools you need the answer to work with? GIMP, Photoshop, 
others?
- Are all the files online, offline or is there a migration strategy needed?
- Is searching/viewing from a central location acceptable, like a web 
server?
- Is EXIF accceptable for the metadata inside the files? Do you need 
more metadata capabilities?
- Are you willing to write some CGI (or other language) to update EXIF data?
- I'd be interested in how you organize that number of photos today.
- I use a 2000 version of My Photo Gallery 
http://fuzzymonkey.net/software/photogallery/ and have hacked the PERL 
for search and GPS metadata links to google maps. I'd be afraid to let 
my search method free on a DB the size of yours though.  There are 5 
projects at freshmeat for Photo Gallery software 
http://freshmeat.net/tags/photo-gallery .

Lifehacker has done a few articles on photo organization 
http://lifehacker.com/search/photo%20organization/ which may be helpful. 
I suspect you will want to find what professional photographers who are 
also nerds do. I fear you'll only find platform specific answers, however.

This is simplistic for your size collection, but 
http://blog.jdpfu.com/2011/01/05/tips-for-digital-photo-organiz-storage-and-archival 
is how I do it. My collection is about 10K photos and 25GB just for the 
source files, not including thumbnails, descriptions, and alternate 
sized files. Those are about 2.4GB.

If you do find a good answer, please let me know. I'm not unhappy with 
my method and I've never found a better solution.
It goes without saying - backup, backup, backup.


On 01/11/2011 01:49 PM, David Tomaschik wrote:
> All,
>
> I've been searching for a solution to this for a while.  My wife and I are
> both avid amateur photographers, if you will, and so we have a collection of
> ~55GB of photos.  Unfortunately, they're not very organized.  I've been
> trying to find a solution to allow us to collaboratively organize this mess
> over a network share.  Unfortunately, tools like Picasa and iPhoto want to
> copy files into a local library and save their tags to a local (and
> proprietary) database.  I'd like to find something cross-platform (she uses
> OS X and Windows and I use Linux, obviously) that will embed the data in the
> files themselves.  Can anyone give me pointers on what I should be looking
> at?