Photo management - An RFI...

Archived from groups: rec.photo.digital (More info?)

A Request for Information...

Photo management tool in a served environment.

I am tearing my hair out so if anyone has any suggestions I would be
very grateful. I thought I had found my ideal tool with iView mediaPro
- despite the high cost - but it is not to be. Here's the situation:

Both my wife and I carry small digital cameras everywhere, we also use
a bigger Olympus, also digital, and occasionally our venerable old
Nikon which pictures will typically be scanned in if only for record
keeping. We have a collection now of around 12,000 files. We have been
doing this for a long time. I do photo restoration and other stuff, she
does web-site work and flash.

We use XP and keep the files under My Pictures in a folder named
Photos. In Photos we have eight or so master family folders named 1997,
1998, and so on. In each of these are folders named something like
"050528 Beatrice's Graduation" and so on which marks an event. Besides
the main YEAR folders ther are speciality folders regarding work done
for companies, animals and other specific points of interest. Some of
these also have a heirarchy of folders of the form "2004/040321 Bert's
retirement" for specific events that span multiple years. This system
works well for us.

We both use photo tools using memory and CPU intensive tools so we each
maintain a relatively new computer with lots of memory and so on. Until
recently I kept the master "Photo" folder on my machine and my wife
would link over to get stuff and deposit changes, but this has not been
working well so we used a server we have on the home network as the
home for the MASTER photo repository. We then synchronize our personal
machines with the master repository. This is working well, except for
the photo management tools - which do not.

I used ThumbsPlus for many years and maybe I should go take a look
again to see if there are any changes, but it had a weak web and
thumbnail feature. We saw the Jasc PhotoAlbum tool and liked it some
years back and bought that. I think PhotoAlbum however has problems
with this many files for it hangs and goes out-to-lunch, suddenly doing
goodness knows what with no feed-back, the machine stops for minutes at
a time, then springs back to life; sometimes it does not come back at
all. So I blew my top with it a month or so ago when the
right-click/new-folder would just bring the machine to its knees. I
reinstalled the thing and tried all sorts of stuff but to no avail.
Enough with that.

Some weeks of research later and I was enamored with Iview MediaPro,
although it was expensive it looked terrific. Then this weekend I found
a problem that took some work. iView uses the concept of a
"drop-folder" in which it expects new pictures to appear. iView checks
this folder when it starts and synchs the DB with the contents. In
MediaPro you can designate many folders - albeit, one by one - to be
"auto-sync" folders. However with my server set-up, ANY folder could
contain changed content, and this would require iView to have auto-sync
active for ALL folders. There are many hundreds of folders and
auto-sync would need to be active for each one, and I am assured this
would also have a considerable performance impact as iView would toddle
through them all at start to see what has changed, if anything.

Ideally any DB <-> folder synch should be done ONLY when a folder is
opened. Maybe iView does this, but turning on the sync feature for ALL
folders, one by one, is extreme. Besides, I might forget as we are
always making new folders.

I tried idImager and I could not get the slide-show to function, no
matter what I did. Their tech support was very good and instantly
replied saying they could not duplicate the problem, they suggested I
send them a screen dump which I have not done as I have not had time
yet. Not sure if the sync problem exists with idImager, I saw no sync
feature so I guess not.

I need to work with the management tool on my own machine and THEN sync
with the server, the latency over the network is not something I am
willing to deal with.

So. Does anyone have any suggestions? We both use XP and the XP
thumbnail and slide show tools in Explorer are quite good, but we lose
all the meta-data. I use the photo tools for red-eye, cropping, sizing,
color and texture, etc., stuff, so I do not need sophisticated features
in the photo manager. However, it is always nice.

Surely there are other server-based photo repository systems in use,
what do they do?

Thanks for any help.

Lawrence