Image Management Please..

Hello everyone,

I have been a gallery on and off for a few years now and for what it does, it does very well. I can't help but think there is still a piece missing. While having a gallery of my images is nice, its not the biggest problem I have with my images, it's finding them.

I think about my iTunes library and how all of my music is id3 tagged correctly. Even with more than 5000 songs I can still locate the specific item I want because I let the system manage the data. And if I want, I have the option of going to my music directory and finding the item myself.

I also like Apple's Aperture a lot. It's management of metadata is great and it allows me to find images quickly. However it ties me to the computer that has it installed for the most part. Sure I can combine libraries from my laptop to my server but this can be a pain. Not to mention my powerbook in not one of the new fast Intel based ones and Aperture is to say the least, S L O W. This function really need to be web based.

So in a nutshell, I want a system where I can upload my images from anywhere, even a locally attached (to the server itself) compact flash reader. I would then be presented with a page to start keywording the uploaded images. I would imagine this could also be done on the client side with an upload app like gallery remote but with additions for keywording and metadata management. Gallery has much of this functionality but focused on the gallery, not image management. Once the images have been cataloged, then I could build galleries from the cataloged images using DB queries of metadata.

Think of it as two basic blocks:

Block 1) The Image Library - This is where images are uploaded, keyworded, and stored or referenced

Block 2) The Gallery - This is the photo gallery. Images used in the gallery are added to the gallery directly from block 1, the image library. Then you could build a gallery of landscape images (for example) by doing some kind of query of all landscape images. You could even implement "smart galleries" where the gallery itself was a query just like itunes implements smart playlists. This could be a very powerful feature. Maybe something like exiftool could be utilized to manage the metadata. I'm keeping my eye out for other programs that might help with this as well.

I'm just one guy but I have to believe that there are other photographers out there that would love something like this. I'm not much of a programmer but would help do this in any way I can. My Son however (17yrs and a 2 year AP computer science student) is itching for a meaningful project this summer that he could use as college admissions leverage.

John Scherer