This page is basically me brain-dumping something. It may not make sense to anyone but myself.

I take digital photos.

Over the last couple of years I've taken about 5,000 (or 12GB) photos. I need a system to help me store and organise these photos.

All the existing gallery software I have tried so far does not seem to cut it. This page is an attempt to establish my criteria for photo management software and potentially develop a solution myself.

Criteria

  • I have devices (cameras, etc.) that output blobs of data (JPEGs, AVIs, MPEGs, WAV, RAW, etc.). A management system should be able to handle them all.

  • It is essential that I can backup my repository of data.

    • It is almost certainly not conceivable to store the entire repository on any consumer backup media. Therefore the solution should support being split up into several archival media.

So, slicing the repository up.

  • You can't do it purely on the basis of time. Perhaps I'll burn off a DVD of 2006 photos. Later on I find more 2006 photos. They can't go on that slice.

  • Or.. let people re-organise slices. This will mean tracking has been backed up.

Browsing the repository

  • I will probably have one copy of all photos in one place, on a web-accessible host. So HTML indexes would be handy.

  • that would also mean the DVDs could be perused from pretty much any computer.

Static HTML generators

  • there are lots of them

  • I need a lazy one. Basically redoing work over 4+GB of data is very time consuming. That rules out llgal, igal.

  • lazygal is possibly an option

  • generate the HTML in the same place as the photos?

Some formal thinking

  • The photo collection is a collection of repositories
  • a repository is something with a fixed size that can be
  • burnt off to a DVD

To import into the repository

  • which slice does it belong to?
  • a slice is read-only once we've decided yeah, we're done, let's burn it
  • so before that, the photos could go anywhere
  • or... maybe we can change a slice but that invalidates the backup

Moo

  • photos SHOULD NOT BE MODIFIED by the management software unless explicitly desired (lossless rotation, supplementing EXIF) -- even then, should we?
  • We want to verify the data to protect against data protection.