Server-based, multi-user, photo organization with tagging, searchability, etc.?

Question

I am trying to come up with a solution to a problem. Our company works in design and fabrication. We have thousands completed projects in our portfolio, thousands of pictures, drawings, designs, etc in a number of formats. Jpeg, PSD, PPT, RAW, DWG, DXF, etc.

Right now these pictures are basically sitting on a computer, backed up to a server, and under the control of one of our artists. If I want a picture of a project for a presentation I am making, first I go to our website and see if it has been posted there. If not, scan through old presentations looking for it, if I can't find it there I go to this person and ask him to find it. He then takes his time and eventually finds it.

What we need is a centralized image database capable of having multiple users and permission levels, tagging, sorting, searching, and preferable some sort of filter-based browsing, as many pictures will fit into multiple categories. ie. location, material, application-type, artist, etc.

If it can provide thumbs of CAD files, great, if not, not a big deal. It does need to provide thumbs of all common image formats, including PSD.

Please help!

Answer 1

Microsoft Sharepoint?



http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/product/capabilities/search/Pages/Search-Server.aspx

Answer 2

This is a lot of work, even for someone who knows what he's doing. You can setup a Linux-Apache server. Dump all the files in there. Categorize them the way you want by folders. Thumbnails go to subfolders. One could create a small script that automatically creates a page for each folder to show all thumbnails within it when accessed though a web browser. Getting the actual image would be simply through downloading by right-clicking the thumbnail and saving to your own computer. This would mean all computers in the company should be networked. If you are brave enough, you can even setup an internet server to allow access from anywhere in the world. To upload new pictures, you could simply depend on that one guy to do it manually for simplicity or let the IT expert setup an FTP server so anyone could do it. The safest way is to give uploading access to everybody but only one guy to screen the files and make it available for downloading.



If I'm not making any sense to you, hire a LAMP specialist. That's a computer geek who specializes in Linux above anything else.

Answer 3

Daminion Server can manage all the files you mentioned and even more. Plus it provides multi-user capabilities so multiple users can access to the centralized image archive library from multiple computers.