GNU Photo Archiving software?

jonr asks: "After I got my Olympus E-100RS camera, I have been enjoying photography again. I now take on average dozens photos a day. Now the problem is ever growing photo collection. I found an excellent archiving software, IMatch but I'm looking for something similar to run under Linux. Folders and sub-folders are are just not cutting it. IMatch allows me to put my photos in a category tree, e.g. a photo of my dog could be placed in Family/Pets and Animals/Dogs. It also has off-line archiving, a must have for growing collection. Now does anybody know of a tool or a collection of tools for this?"

Comments

Umm, a database?

[Anonymous Coward]

howzabout a database.

fields for image, title, caption, category, when, where, a longer description of what it is, and any keywords to find this.

Throw the whole thing behind a web page, and a navigable image library.

Re: Am I oversimplifying the problem here?

[InitZero]

Why not just use the filesystem to categorize pictures, and some other solution for hierarchical storage or removable media cataloging? Then, when you want to look for a picture, you just search for the directory/category name, and it'll either tell you where it is

Yes, you are oversimplifying. Big time.

I work for a newspaper. Our single greatest technological hurdle is archiving in some sort or reasonable fashion.

You'd think the Associated Press would have this figured out. They create tens of thousands of pictures a day. They have the big stick to get the system built. They had their developers create a product called 'AP Preserver'. It was to be the end-all be-all photo archive solution. After many years of trying to get it right, they dropped the product. Even with all their knowledge of the subject and a rather large check book, they couldn't get it right.

In the past, archiving photos was easy. They were physical and humanity was well versed with physical items. No longer is that the case. Digital photos are a pain in the buttocks.

Part of the problem is expectations are higher now that photos are digital. When photos were on strips of film, often times they weren't kept for more than five or ten years. Even folks who kept them longer generally didn't keep out-takes (photos not used in the newspaper).

Now, we are expected to keep every picture taken by every photographer of every event forever. Worse than that, folks want to be able to search for photos using keywords and sometimes even by what the picture looks like. (For example, if you want all the profile pictures of Bush, all you'd need to do is find a picture of Bush in profile and then feed it to the search engine and it will find the rest. (Just for clarification, when I say 'profile pictures of Bush', I mean profile pictures of President Bush and not profile pictures of hairy bush.)

The fairly large newspaper I work for creates a gig or so of photos and graphics each day (speaking only for Editorial and not Advertising). We use a product called Portfolio by Extensis. It runs on an NT server which doesn't help the AskSlashdotter in the least. We will probably use Portfolio for another couple years until CCI's MediaStore is ready for prime time.

Some will say I'm being silly by comparing a major newspaper to a guy with a digital camera. We both face the same issues of cataloging and retrieval. The only difference is that he is probably using a 60-gig harddrive and we're using a multi-terabyte array.

Anyone who thinks that archiving photos is easy has never tried.

I'm sorry to report that there are no great photo archiving solutions. Find the one that sucks the least and you have accomplished much.

Matt