The question is, how would you manage a multi-user photo library that allows for meaningful searches?
Here's the background to the question:
I work in the Marketing Communication department for a small college, and among our responsibilities is photography, news writing, Web content management, and graphic design for the campus. Including student workers, we have about 10 employees who all need to be able to peruse stock photos and events photos simultaneously and in a way that helps them efficiently locate the right image for the project they're working on.
Currently, we have the photos divided into directories on a shared folder on our Xserve and everyone simply connects to the server and looks through the photos in Finder. That worked well when we had a manageable number of photos. However, with hundreds and hundreds of gigs of photos in hundreds of folders, it's getting harder and harder to find the picture you're looking for, even if you know you've seen it before.
Since the photos are organized in folders by event, it's especially hard to find the right photo to fit a theme, such as "finances" or "active learning." To solve this, we'd like a way to either add photos to multiple albums or tag photos. The goal is to make searching and indexing these photos more meaningful.
Being the "Web guy" and a FOSS promoter, my first instinct is to use a PHP system such as Gallery2 or ZenPhoto that allows batch import and searchable tags and comments. Set up on our Xserve, it would allow us to have our own photo intranet, or if we configured the firewall for it, access to our photo files from home.
I'd like other opinions though. How would you handle a multi-user photo library? What are the software options available? How much do they cost?
Here's the background to the question:
I work in the Marketing Communication department for a small college, and among our responsibilities is photography, news writing, Web content management, and graphic design for the campus. Including student workers, we have about 10 employees who all need to be able to peruse stock photos and events photos simultaneously and in a way that helps them efficiently locate the right image for the project they're working on.
Currently, we have the photos divided into directories on a shared folder on our Xserve and everyone simply connects to the server and looks through the photos in Finder. That worked well when we had a manageable number of photos. However, with hundreds and hundreds of gigs of photos in hundreds of folders, it's getting harder and harder to find the picture you're looking for, even if you know you've seen it before.
Since the photos are organized in folders by event, it's especially hard to find the right photo to fit a theme, such as "finances" or "active learning." To solve this, we'd like a way to either add photos to multiple albums or tag photos. The goal is to make searching and indexing these photos more meaningful.
Being the "Web guy" and a FOSS promoter, my first instinct is to use a PHP system such as Gallery2 or ZenPhoto that allows batch import and searchable tags and comments. Set up on our Xserve, it would allow us to have our own photo intranet, or if we configured the firewall for it, access to our photo files from home.
I'd like other opinions though. How would you handle a multi-user photo library? What are the software options available? How much do they cost?