Photo Management

[cgiuk]

Hi everyone.

I work at a small prep school that has built up quite an impressive archive of photos over the 200+ years it has been in existance. Add onto that the sheer number of photos produced by our current staff and I have a bit of a problem. At present I have close to 60,000 images. I've got them stored on their own server but at the moment, they are just in a simple folder structure.

Does anyone have any great ideas on how I could organise/manage these? I really need the staff to be able to dump new photos onto the system without having to come to me. I have toyed with setting up Gallery 2 to run through our intranet but I never feel that it is particularly robust.

[CyberNerd]

I have toyed with setting up Gallery 2 to run through our intranet but I never feel that is is particularly robust.

any particular reason? It' a longstanding project (7 yrs) has payed support, 150k+ posts in forums. regular updates etc.

[cgiuk]

Don't get me wrong Cybernerd....I use gallery on the website and it works fine. I installed it on the network and when I got to the 10,000 photo mark, it just seemed a little cumbersome (I know that 10,000 is a lot so what should I expect). I was just wondering if anyone knew of another way of doing this? We can't be the only school producing tons of photos. How do other people get around it?

[webman]

Just directory structures here - simple and effective.

[CyberNerd]

It was the first thing I thought of when I read the post title, so i guess I was suprised if it wouldn't work/scale well. Maybe worth checking server/database load for bottlenecks.

[alan-d]

Try Coppermine. Best run on a Linux server but can be done on windows using WAMP.

[cgiuk]

Thanks guys...I'll check them all out and see what I can find. My big issue was with getting a really user friendly solution where the staff can really easily dump photos into the right location.

[maniac]

I run RSgallery2 on joomla on our staff intranet. Only got about 300 or so pictures on it at the moment, but now people are noticing it, I'm bound to get more requests top put photos on it next year. Not sure how it would handle large numbers of images thou. It is also possible to allow people upload images from the gallery pages, although I have this option disabled as I like to manage it myself so it's nice and organised!

We used to use our public drive for photos, but it ended up in such a mess that we've scrapped that idea.

Mike

[mark]

Good question cgiuk - we have exactly the same problem here and have been asked to solve it. (65k photos and growing )

We definitely don't want a web solution, just folder structures. People just dump pictures anywhere at the moment, don't name them, etc etc. How do you sort them?

Document management? Quotas? :?:

[contink]

I don't know of any utilities that would work within windows as a native solution so it may be that you need to think seriously about an intranet website specifically to handle this sort of thing..

Plenty of packages out there like Gallery2, etc... that allow you to upload, resize, provide permissions, album structure, etc... as part of the process.

[Biccies]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread!

I'm currently looking for something to organise our pictures! Currently we have quite a neat folder structure which is organised into years and the event the picture was taken at. However, we have a need to be able to search pictures based on more information. Obviously for this to work I would need to add data to pictures, for example, "Year 13", "Results day", "Sports day". This way if a member of staff asks for pictures of year 13s at this years sports day I can just do a search (Or even better, they can!) and not have to trawl through all the sports day pictures with a member of staff with me to identify the year 13s.
I've had a search, and there must be something out there that will do this and allow a search to be done via the LAN, but I'm failing to enter the correct search terms! Can anyone help?

[Chillibear]

Worth taking a look at imgSeek and the corresponding server components. I've never had too much luck with large collections and the desktop version (crashes), but I do like the idea! Not quite what you're looking for in terms of upload/import type system, but worth a glance.

[beeswax]

I think you'll find that Picasa does something similar

[bopeep36]

If you need to do metadata tagging and complex searching you might consider Alfresco, which has an open source version

[p858snake]

I haven't used it in a while but ZenPhoto (web based image gallery) uses a simple directory structure to sort images out into "Albums" so you could just map a drive to its albums folder so people can easily dump photos into it.