Help me organize the photos at work please!

January 3, 2007 11:16 AM

Creatives Asset Management: Any suggestions for organizing creatives, mostly photos but some otherwise, across a network that doesn't cost thousands of dollars?

I just started at a company and all our creative assets are on cd, and we have to browse through a binder with thumbnail printouts to find what we need. I got to thinking about how easy using istockphoto.com at my previous job was because of the fantastic keyword searching. One thing lead to another, and now I'm in charge of finding an inexpensive solution that we can put our photos into and add keywords to so we can have the same flexibility and ease of use.

I searched ask already and while there are a lot of hits I could have missed, two things seem to come up so far. Either a network/server/shared solution that costs thousands of dollars, or really good, inexpensive (sometimes free!) solutions that are for local organization. Is there anything inbetween? Like Picassa for networks? Or is that crazy talk?

posted by [insert clever name here] to media & arts (5 comments total)

Depending on exactly what you are looking for (and there's a LOT of variety in this software-space) either:

Gallery2 which is sort of a private flickr.

or

Dspace, which is a full-fledged digital library, complete with archival metadata and all sorts of search abilities. Dspace is what lots of libraries use to provide electronic access to their digital repositories.

Either will run on a standard LAMP server, which is either free or cheap depending on what you already have laying around. The most expensive part of the whole thing will probably be the digital storage/backup solution that you should implement. But otherwise, Dspace will handle just about anything.
posted by griffey at 11:36 AM on January 3, 2007

Either a locally installed Web-Gallery - or simply a good folder and file naming scheme in combination with Google Desktop Search (across the network).

I would rather go with Gallery2 as just recommended, but indexing everything everything with Google Desktop is very fast and convienient for searching.
posted by homodigitalis at 12:25 PM on January 3, 2007

The photographers and editors at National Geographic Traveler magazine use iView. They raved about it at a seminar I took with them, and I'm now a satisfied individual user (using it about 10mo). I can't speak to network use. Unfortunately it was recently sold to Microsoft, and as a Mac user I'm not optimistic. You might fare better in a network/PC set-up.
posted by cocoagirl at 2:40 PM on January 3, 2007

speaking of flickr, well, um, why not use flickr? just mark everything "friends and family only" to keep it private. a flickr pro account is pretty cheap- less than $40 a year.
posted by twistofrhyme at 3:52 PM on January 3, 2007

Flickr is being considered. The downside is that if something every goes awry, we don't have the data, flickr does.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 7:02 AM on January 4, 2007