Photo Organization

As almost anyone who knows me is aware of, during a year of study abroad in Japan as an undergraduate (2002-2003 school year), I essentially become a photo blogger, going from about 500 pictures a semester to 2000+ pictures a semester. At this rate, the website I had created to share these pictures soon took on an urgent need to be able to organize, find, and browse these pictures effectively. The RisuPicWeb software that I've been developing to organize my pictures since 2002 was forced to become database-driven by 2004 when I started graduate school in order to support even basic search. The first database version was created as a graduate database class project, and I have continued to bend class projects to connect in to my personal photo management interests (as well as necessities) throughout my graduate education (I believe I'm up to about 7 picture-related class projects).

When you take a few hundred pictures a year, you can manage them (say at the file level) largely by creating a series of albums for the handful of important events. This is what software like Apple's iPhoto and Google's Picasa software handle well. At some point, however, you just have too many pictures per year and programs like iPhoto start to become unwieldly. At some point, multiple levels of folders seems to become almost essentially to handle it, especially for the browsing use case. Also, for me, half the fun of photos is being able to share them with people, and rich client applications indexing a local photo repository seem to fall short in this regard. Granted programs like Picasa now have integration with online posting, but, in my mind, I would have 99% of my photos online anyway. A rich client, however, would be a good substitute for an FTP program (which is what is currently used to upload pictures to my own system) to make it easier to use for casual users. Ideally, it would be able to sync with your local file store, so you can have complete backups of all your photos on multiple machines (i.e. desktop, laptop, web server) and I could post pictures from any machine and have them replicated. Perhaps at some level, I just want my photos in CVS/SVN.