Managing Photos Locally

November 29, 2007 12:05 AM

I need an equivalent of Flickr or Picasa Web Albums that can be hosted locally on our network.

I have about 1,000 pictures of art and architecture that I am putting into a database that will be accessed by various researchers. The pictures will be tagged and commented on, and I would like the researcher to be able to look up pictures by keyword.

I know that Flickr is capable of doing this, but for the sake of professionalism, I would like the database to be either on its own dedicated domain, or stored locally on our network.

posted by daviss to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Gallery!
posted by lia at 12:07 AM on November 29, 2007

Gallery sucks at tagging.

When I asked this nobody was able to come up with an answer and I decided I'd have to write it myself.

I haven't done that yet though. Sorry, I've been busy.
posted by aubilenon at 12:45 AM on November 29, 2007

I 2nd Gallery.

It is one of the "free add-ons" offered by my hosting company. (Free as in, open source.) It took less than an hour to be up and running. Also, the new version of gallery does support tags. Though, I haven't used them extensively.
posted by bodega at 12:56 AM on November 29, 2007

Coppermine is, or at least was, the only decent alternative to Gallery before service hosting got trendy. It also integrates (to a lesser extent than gallery) with a number of CMSes.
posted by datacenter refugee at 1:05 AM on November 29, 2007

This kind of application is just about the oldest one on the web and you've got an effectively unlimited number of choices.

I would say that the easiest thing to do would be to simply set up a blog at one of the myriad sites that provides a blog with a domain name, comments, and tagging. Here's a nifty example of someone doing that (probably NSFW).

If you want something more tightly targeted at photo album functionality, I'd say that there are three basic approaches you could take to finding the right software:

1. Go through a list like this one by one, taking a look at screenshots and demos, maybe installing and test-driving ones that look interesting.

2. Google around and find a web site you like that does this sort of thing - an artist's web site, for example - and ask them what software they use.

3. If there's a techie / IT / web person who would actually be setting everything up for you, he or she might have something they're already familiar and comfortable with.

Another note is that if you might need a more fully-fledged web site than just a photo gallery in the near future you could look into what's called a web content management system or CMS. Many CMS products provide an image gallery module in addition to other facilities like setting up site navigation, new pages, forums, community features, etc. Some popular ones that might be suitable are Drupal or DotNetNuke, but again there are myriad choices here. Here's a site listing many different products and indicating whether an image / photo gallery is available for each one. But be warned that selecting and setting up a CMS can be an enormous project.
posted by XMLicious at 1:24 AM on November 29, 2007

I use zenphoto, which does tagging, albums, comments, archiving, is open-source, in-built search, etc, etc. I love it.
posted by wzcx at 9:55 AM on November 29, 2007

what about this smugmug site ?
it says you can have "your own url" i don't know if that means just a subdomain or not though.
posted by low affect at 7:12 PM on November 29, 2007

Sharepoint Services which is free if you have a Windows 2003 server license has a library for this. Sharepoint will give you your tags, and has built in search.
posted by Eddie Mars at 5:58 PM on November 30, 2007