Does anyone have suggestions on a photo management tool? I would like to know two things: 1) Regardless of platform, what is your favorite photo management tool? 2) What is your favorite photo management tool that can be run in Linux? Maybe your answers to 1 and 2 are the same, maybe they are different. I would love to hear.
I've thought about dumping stuff in flickr, but it bothers me to have some company own all my data and that I can't access my photos offline. The same concern has stopped me from using del.icio.us and gmail.
Posted by enigma at May 23, 2006 10:57 AMBasically.... the separation between #1 and #2 are no longer acceptable to me for broad tools. And I even tend to enjoy that my client tools (firefox, gaim, inkscape, gimp, OpenOffice, etc all run on multiple platforms).
Recently I have been simplifying my life by giving up on maintaining my own infrastructure for things and using more web services:
Flickr for photos
Gmail for mail
Gtalk for jabber based IM
Google Calendar for scheduling*
Deli.cio.us for bookmarks
Bloglines for feedreading
* (This is a real recent move. Its way better than I thought - by using sms for alarms, and being able to add events to the calendar with sms, I have elminated the need to carry my palm pda. And the shared calendar components are great. I have been meaning to blog about it [smile])
My new platform is firefox, with a fallback to any other standards based browser in the future. I find myself switching computers and platforms all day long. And having my most used tools available on the Internet even means storage isn't a problem (that will change too for some when gdrive comes out). I used to be scared of such things from a philosophical perspective, now I think I am just being practical.
I don't have external backup drives, nor the regiment to perform regular backups for my large volume of photos. So flickr was an easy choice from me. It has been hard with dsl bandwidth comitting to uploading them, and I haven't got my complete archive up... but they have some amazing management tools that rival some desktop software. Their new photo organizer is pretty hot, albeit a bit challenging for the web browser and bandwidth.
The final mover for me was finding out that I can order a DVD backup of all my photos, though its a bit expensive and when Yahoo bought them, I knew they weren't going away without a warning. And I wasn't going to be installing and upgrading the inferior gallery interface on my own server or hosted space for the rest of my life. I would rather have features come my way without any effort of my own in this software as as service model.
Now, probably I should still have a local archive, with some software to organize other than the filesystem but I haven't really looked into it. I know justice liked using the mono based linux app which had some neat features. My bet is that some of these tools will have built in flickr upload/syncronization features which may be a good combo.
But many times my wife and I will both transfer photos off our camera to different machines (different platforms) and so flickr made sense as the aggregating point.
One of the areas where I don't use an application provider is for blogging. I prefer the flexibility of running my own blog engine. However, I did recently move it off my server at home to a web hosting provider.
Yes the days are almost gone where I would run a production internet server out of my house for email and other such stuff. It no longer gives me the benefit or pleasure it once did. Only added expense and that itchy feeling behind my ears that I can't ensure availability or disaster recovery for my data.
Not probably the answer you were looking for, but this was another one of those things that I was ready to explode if I didn't share ;)
[/end blogging on Christophs's comment system]
I've been considering my options now for awhile as well when it comes to all the tools that are out there and this is what I've come down to for me:
Photos: I use picasa2 for my local photo management, it's got a bunch of nifty features and other photo tweaking stuff to it and I've found that with few exceptions that this meets my needs both for photo tweaking and management. I use flickr as my display portal now for photos I want others to see.
For my other solutions, I'm slowly weaning off of my server and will be moving it to a hosted solution at some point in the near future so that I don't have to mess with it anymore. I find myself often in windows XP at home, both because of consulting work and because I haven't taken the time to get my linux install going here.
I'm a little wary of google calendar and gmail simply because I've had a bad taste from google desktop and privacy. I understand that the internet is hardly private, however there are documents and other things that clients send me that I'm not interested in them getting published.
Anyway, that's my $0.02
Posted by: Dave at May 23, 2006 10:05 PMTo follow onto my picasa comments, they just released picasa for linux as a pre-beta:
http://slashdot.org/articles/06/05/26/0310229.shtml
Posted by: Dave at May 26, 2006 11:29 AM