Photo Management Collaboration Tools

[Jason Slater]

We recently had our photo server wiped out and are considering other options for archival and search.  We were using a customized implementation of Gallery but the upload via ftp was difficult for the novice user, the tagging was confusing and the search results interface was terrible due to the tiny thumbnail size.  Any other tools out there for photo management?

[Gordon Wright]

We've been using Adobe Lightroom and then publishing to a private Flickr account so it can be accessed remotely. The program can be a little tricky to learn, but it's fantastic for tagging and search, and the tags and captions carry over to Flickr.

[Erik Hagen]

What version of Gallery were you using? We've been using Gallery 3 for a while now and I quite like it. Uploading can be done via the web interface, even in batches, and is easy to use for most people. So not FTP needed. We customized the theme to use bigger thumbnails and show more per page. I agree the search is the weakest part, we need to address that.

Another open source tool is http://www.resourcespace.org/. Haven't used it in a while but it looks like it got a big upgrade. It also hold all kinds of documents like PSD, AI, Word, etc.

The only non-open source tool I've looked at is Widen, which looks robust but I haven't tried it out.

[Jason Slater]

Not sure what version it was and the latest is still on the table.  Thanks for the suggestions.  Batch web uploads and larger thumbs in search results would be a big help.

[Dan Bashaw]

To second Erik: You might want to consider ResourceSpace (http://www.resourcespace.org/)

We are currently testing a Bitnami install of it, and are considering adding it to our intranet as a DAM (Digital Asset Management) system, to replace our creaky directory-based photo filing system.