Company Servers

Currently I am in a search for something to solve a photo management problem. My company has thousands of photos and we need a way to organize them more effectively than windows explorer. Before I continute, let me make it clear I do not have the best knowledge on how servers work. Our photos are on the company server, and we need something that will allow anyone who accesses these photos to search through the use of keywords,file names,date taken, etc. Is this such a service?

i didn't mean to say service.
I read the link but im still confused.
Do you have to run this off of a website? For example, the photos are in the network Z drive. My friend said something like if you installed gallery into Z, you would type ":z ____" into the web browser and then then the gallery would open? Also, does gallery have a way to tag photos so you can easily go through thousands and find the one you want?

Gallery runs on a web server, whether that's public or internal to your company only doesn't matter, but it does not crawl directories and index content like that.

To use your photos with Gallery, you'd need to go through the process of importing them into Gallery. There is Picasa and if you search Google, there are ways to share a Picasa database across users.

There'a also this really expensive piece of hardware:
http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/gsa.html

But I'm not sure if it will read and index EXIF info or not.

No offense, but you don't seem to be the right guy for the company to be asking. From your questions, you sound like an end user and not an IT person. Maybe you're just gathering information, but a better solution might be to coordinate with your IT staff and come up with a solution.

And just what is meant by "thousands of photos". Is that 10,000? Which isn't very many at all really or is that 500,000?

If I was doing this for my company. First we'd decide if we want to have all of these images duplicated into another structure (under Gallery), eventually move them into Gallery's structure, or not use a system like Gallery at all.

Once that decision has been made, then I'd write a script that crawled through the known storage directories of photos and output information, such as EXIF data, image location. That would be done no matter what.

If we decided to use Gallery, I'd use data collected above format it friendly for the Bulk Upload module and use that to import the images into Gallery.

If we decided not to use Gallery, then I'd have had that script also create thumbnails and store those someplace. Then I'd start the process of getting that data collected into a database and writing something quick-n-dirty to search that database using a web page and it would generate pages using the thumbnails. But then you've also got to deal with people creating new images, etc. It becomes a huge PITA.

I'd either use a system like Gallery where people import their images and it can do most of the work and it takes care of the storage, or find some software or appliance that can crawl the network and index images.

Really though, it's hard to just answer your question. Gallery is intended to host your photos on your website. That's it's purpose. Only you know what you want to accomplish. You're going to have to get to know Gallery to see if it can do what you want or any other software for that matter.
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