What would you include in an image management/sharing system?

Question

I am looking to build a web-based tool to provide an image repository that can be shared like this..

Required:

• Upload multiple images in high quality EPS, RAW, etc.

• At any time a group of people may need to see a subset of photos (but not all) through a link. Most often it would be to view higher quality photos. What I envision is selecting a number of items, select "generate link", which would generate a slideshow of just those items.

• At any time a user may want to download one or more images, it should zip them up and send them one file of those.

Nice to have:

• If realistic, maintaining versions of each image would be helpful. Maybe tie it to a SVN repository?
• A High resolution image viewer that allows zooming in and out of images and relatively easy browsing -- flash based
• keywording / categorization of some kind.
• Auto-resizing images to standard sizes for different needs (thumbs, print, etc)

The purpose of this is to create a central image repository for one type of item. The repository then could be used by people to download high res shots, or browse other things.

I'm having to sort a few thousand images out as a favor. I don't want to look at it again, any thoughts/ideas would be greatly appreciated.

I have experience managing larger datasets, but if there are some nuances to managing images problematically I'm all ears.

Answer 1

first thing comes to mind is an sorter/categorizer of some kind with a search feature. If your repository grows to any size at all it'll be a pain to dig through everything to find what you want.

Answer 2

I think for something like this categorization is key and should probably go on your required list. Like yx said digging through large amounts of information without it will definitely be a pain. If images can be arranged into galleries then categorization of individual photos within the gallery would also probably handy.

I would probably make thumbnails a high priority as well since as they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and I don't think you want your file names quite that long.

Answer 3

As a user, I'd want beautiful UI first and foremost; considering Flash is a good start. Immediately second, though, I'd want findability.

The first one's a challenge, but done right, the second's tough; it's all about the metadata. Tagging is a bare minimum. Additionally, you might also consider encouraging some sort of community- or user-driven approach to gathering metadata for imagery, since as the repository grows, it'll tend to grow out of control; to the extent you can prevent that from happening, your users will thank you for it. I've probably got ten thousand digital photos of my own, and finding anything in that haystack anymore (a haystack I created myself) still causes me something between an O(n) and O(log n) headache every time.

Good luck!

Answer 4

Some way to tag items/people in the images a-la facebook (I think it's facebook that does that) to aid in searching/sorting the images.

Answer 5

I would want a way to sell the photos as stock photography. Not only could I make a few bucks, but maybe they will show up in an advertisement.

As someone that uses stock photography, letting users select the copyright options on their photos is very useful.

Answer 6

Being able to link to a photo with different sizing options, ala gravatar. That way I can upload a full-size image and immediately have access to unlimited thumbnail and preview sizes.

Answer 7

Look at the interfaces for flickr, smugmug, and pbase for some ideas. (and maybe photobucket which sucked a few years ago when I tried it but perhaps it's gotten better.)

My beef with most of them is how they handle access control. Just allowing "public" and "private" is too coarse. Flickr does a passable job by having a "guest pass".

Consider whether you want to allow direct linking of images. (e.g. an permalink to the images themselves, rather than a permalink to a webpage that generates a temporary link to the image.) If you do have an permalink then essentially anyone can put that image onto their webpage using your server's bandwidth, without any attribution to your website or to the image owner.

Flickr's tools like their API and uploadr are very nice....