Photo Management...ARRGGHHHH

[Elizabeth Cogar]

Currently using iPhoto but finding time to tag 20 gazillion images is overwhelming and not being able to nest folders is not good plus sharing is cumbersome, and only available in network, soooooooo.....what is everyone else doing? Has anyone found the holy grail? I welcome ALL ideas, directions, no matter how seemingly insane...

[Page Lennig]

Hi Elizabeth - Though certainly not the holy grail, we started to use Flickr (pro edition ($25/year) for our photos. Unlimited uploads, we can tag and sort. We are still trying to work out a protocol for sharing with various depts in our school. We don't make these photos public (they are all private), though we can share with certain users (yearbook, development, etc). It's a nice off-campus solution (and it doesn't give us another server to maintain).
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[Drew Forsberg]

I am using Aperture 2. I have about 10,000 photos or so, personal and school. It has a nice way of setting up projects and folders that makes it pretty easy to manage. I can also store the photos on a separate drive and work on them "remotely". The other nice feature is it has a photo vault that you can use to back up the libraries. Not sure it is the holy grail but I have had pretty good luck with it. I was using iPhoto before I got this and was pulling my hair out.

[Shahwar Qureshi]

Hi Elizabeth,
We use Extensis. We developed a plan about five years ago for archiving, and we are slowly making it happen. We have a network share where teachers and staff drop their pictures. We have tried to coach them on how to properly name their folders (event name and date). We had a few key users archive them in Extensis. We planned out keywords and naming conventions for everyone.

We are revisiting who can archive in Extensis because it is difficult to enforce the standards. The cool thing about Extensis is that we can publish albums to the web easily (and set them to autoupdate as well).

Our vision is to have a digital archive of a student's work from K-12 as well as a photographic archive of their days at the school.

The devil is in the details though- the more you plan before implementing, the better. Ultimately, everyone can use the archive- development, alumni, admissions, etc, but we are still getting there.