Still trying to figure out an image catalog solution. Unbelievably, the extensive public feedback on my site hasn't come up with the golden answer yet, so I have had to resort to Google Groups and Photo.net.
After taking enough digital photos and buying a Super Coolscan 4000 to scan in the rest of my slides and negatives, my filesystem is a mess. Pictures are scattered all over the place, different versions (resolutions, cropping, adjustments) are scattered all over the place, projects are scattered all over the place. It's only getting worse.
I need some software to manage all my images. I know that there tons of them, ranging from free MySQL applications to enormously expensive professional stock library databases. What I am looking for needs two, perhaps three features.
Two of them are common. There has to be a good tagging system to allow me to have multiple taxonomies describing the same pool of photos. "search by film" "search by project" "search by subject" "search by genre" etc. etc. There also has to be a generalized storage system -- the photos should be able to be stored roughyl anywhere on my pc, and just have the catalog point to the appropriate location.
The third requirement is the tricky one... When I think about how I use my digital images, it occurs to me that for cataloging purposes the atomic level is not always a specific .jpg. Instead it's a single image, of which there many be many adjusted versions.
An example would be a photo of a ferry I took in India. I scanned it into a 30MB photoshop file. Now I have four versions... a 50MB adjusted .psd file with which I adjusted the color and levels, a 10MB cropped version of the the .psd file, and lastly, a 120KB .jpeg of the cropped and adjusted file.
Now, I really consider those different revisions of the same image-atom. The taxonomy would mostly be the same ("india" "fuji provia" "street photography").
So when I go searching for a "photo of india that I took with provia film" it needs to only return the image-atom, not all three. If I like the image-atom, then I can decide which version I want to work with, or derive into another, fourth revision.
Is there software available that can work with this sort of abstraction? I realize it's not totally tidy. One revision of an image-atom might have some differences in its taxonomy, for instance. And it also causes issues relating to where the image-atom and its revisions are stored. But basically, this is the sort of thing that would make a storage program really useful.
Ideas?