Some sort of efficient, effective image sharing.

June 3, 2010 2:37 PM

My far-flung co-workers and I need a system whereby we can share large amounts of tagged, hi-res images. I'm aware of Picassa, but I want to cover my bases. Specifics inside.

We're a small team of editors spread around the country, and we need to share images with each other. Ideally, all of these images will be in an online database where all of the editors will be able to access them and search the database by tag, image name, and size. The editors also need to be able to download these images to their local hard drive.

I'm also hoping to find an automatic upload system for this – so that when one of us downloads a new image to our local hard drive in a folder we've synced, the online database will automatically suck up that image and make it available to the whole team.

I've looked into picassa and I think it will do most of that for us, assuming we pay for more storage space. Is there an even better program or a service out there that I'm missing? We could potentially invest a little money or developer hours into this, but not much. Thanks!

posted by thebergfather to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

FlickrPro is what we use for this very thing. It doesn't have the autosync (that I'm aware) but it's available globally, has permission and download options (we have some albums set to public, others set to share only with contacts (who are the team members)). It lets you tag, group, geotag, and store/transport the original resolution with exif data. All that for a single, small, yearly fee.
posted by msbutah at 3:32 PM on June 3, 2010

Best answer: Seconding Flickr Pro. That's what we use and it works fine. The autosyncing thing would be possible, but I've never tried it. Something like http://flickrsync.freehostia.com/ may be what you want.

You could also look at box.net if you'd ever want to share things other than images.
posted by Hartster at 3:52 PM on June 3, 2010

Response by poster: Thanks msbutah and Hartster! I've never used Flickr for personal use so I guess I had written it off, but I'll definitely sign up and play around with it now. And that syncing program looks really promising.

If anyone else has experience using Flickr or Picassa for stuff like this, your testimonials and complaints would be appreciated.
posted by thebergfather at 4:37 PM on June 3, 2010

Flickr and also SmugMug. You can buy extra storage on Picasa for something like $5/yr for 20 GB.
posted by kenliu at 5:05 PM on June 3, 2010

I've only used Flickr for personal use, and never used Picasa, but Flickr is the gold standard I would hold all other photo hosting sites against. It is hands down one of the best sites on the internet for user experience, IMO. You should start with the Flickr FAQs (in particular this one about a pro account).
posted by asciident at 5:53 PM on June 3, 2010

Axomic (which isn't free) may do what you want. It's typically used by architectural firms for their proprietary image databases.

Disclaimer: I sorta know the founders from some time back
posted by MuffinMan at 2:14 AM on June 4, 2010