IPTC Writes To Images & Image "Linking"?

Hello!

I haven't used Gallery since Gallery1, so I'm a bit of a 'noob' all over again.

I'm happy to see that Gallery2 has come a long way in the meantime, and moreso because I've become somewhat of an amateur photographer and might have good need for the improvements therein.

I'm hoping to make Gallery2 my Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool. The fact that it's online all the time will make it easy for me to keep a centralized repository of all my keywords, photos, DNG originals, and edits, and I'm hoping it'll be configurable enough for my needs.

Now, the two things I can't do right now that stand in my way are:

1.- IPTC writes back to images.

I understand this is a task in the feature request tracker - last I saw it was at 60% back in 2005. I'm curious about more information on this - is this still on-going? Is anyone aware of a non-official solution to writing IPTC data back to your images?

I'd love this ability as I currently tag all my keywords using Lightroom, and Gallery2 and Flickr cleverly pick these up on import. However, I'd like to switch from using Lightroom to Gallery2 as my main tool, but if it doesn't write back to the images, I'll have a hard time exporting to Flickr later! Or, if I decide I want to try out another DAM tool, I'll have all my hard work locked into Gallery.

2.- Ability to 'link' files to each other

This one really isn't a show stopper, so much as a really nice to have. I'm not really sure if there's a way to 'link' images one to another. Specifically I want to do this for photos I've edited, to link them back to the original DNG.

One tool I've used, idImager, was fantastic at maintaining what they called 'versions' - which were essentially a set of links to related images (i.e., an 'original' image, a 'web' version, a 'print' version, etc). Ideally I'd love to have something similar in Gallery, so I can still store the DNG but look at the prettified version.

Anyhow, does anyone know of such abilities, or any info thereof?

Apologies in advance if this is the wrong forum; just thought I'd get a discussion going.

Cheers!

-e-