I'm thinking about developing a database designed to keep track of photos. Other than the database being able to read EXIF data from the files, and the option of printing at various sizes, what else would you like to have in a photography database?
I like the ability to tag photos that some software has so that it's possible to sort by different categories...ie. all pet photos, all flower photos, all kid photos...and to be able to tag a photo multiple ways.
Ability to sort on all EXIF fields (I've used this in the past to find all close focused images, or all shot at particular aperture/ shutter combinations etc)
CD/ DVD backup/archiving support/ index generation/ html indexing automation
Support for a variety of RAW file formats
fuzzy searching on topics/ titles
an easy way to apply categories to pictures (this is the main lack with most databases)
Support for 100,000 pictures or so, probably more with resonable performance
A means of adding keywords that doesn't require four or five mouse clicks before you start typing - would only need to be a text box and an enter buttton.
My camera produces a text file containing the EXIF data, so using by 4D i wrote a database to import this data, I have added field allowing me to categories the pictures, so I can find all the photos of say "landscapes" very easy.
I was thinking of importing the photos but the database would grow very very fast.
"Support for 100,000 pictures or so, probably more with resonable performance" 100,000 x 1.5megs = 150GB need a very very large hard drive.
The user should have the ability to add categories for sorting and include extra search phrases.
I am also working on a database with a friend of mine and our favorite feature up to now is the user system. It will have the button "I am on this photo". That way your friends can help sorting and you can search for photos of groups of people.
The main problem yet to be solved is how are we going to keep the exif data for photos we change in photoshop.
2 choices:
a) load all originals to database and save exif data on the server side. Change the photo and replace the original with the photoshoped one.
b) use a client side program to collect all exif data and image names into a textfile which is uploaded with the photos.
a rating field attached to each image where you could enter a rating, such as a "1" or "2"... or nothing, and later be able to sort all of the images by this rating. With this you could have view the 1's or all the 2's at the same time. Photoshop has a rating field but I think it only works on a folder at a time, not sure if it works on subfolders.
The ability to archive to CD/DvD but to have large thumbs (small file size) stay on the hard drive... Then if you say you want it, it tells you which CD/DvD to put in...
"Support for 100,000 pictures or so, probably more with resonable performance" 100,000 x 1.5megs = 150GB need a very very large hard drive.
150Gb isn't that big by current standards, but yes, I'd expect a decent
database to be well integrated with an offline storage/ archiving/ recovery system. At least knowing which disks files were archived to, keeping the textual meta-data for the archived image and also probably associated thumbnail indexes. The real trick is having a database that
can process that amount of files efficiently.
btw the files a high end digi-cam produces are closer to 6-12Mb not 1.5Mb, so we are probably looking at closer to 600Gb or so
So this is to be a personal software app? I have been using iView MediaPro for Mac and it does almost all of what has been mentioned. Is there nothing very adequate for windows? Or is this for something more specific in terms of photography. The above handles all multimedia files.
tracy
If nothing else...would be a good app to "cheat" off of for ideas.
