Photos — db and presentations
There is a need across campus to present galleries of photos which draw upon databases of photos.
Several tools present photos and allow you to maintain a desktop catalog — iView is probably the strongest of the smaller applications. Others have template restrictions or don’t allow for the robust catalog management.
How do you implement something at the server level though? Portfolio and Cumulus are decent commercial products. Cumulus’ interface has always made me a little itchy and Portfolio recently got a good review from a colleague.
As for managing catalogs on a server though these may not be ideal in the academic environment… but to be conclusive more investigation is likely necessary.
There is Gallery, Coppermine, and another small opensource tool called photos. Future development of photos does not look promising in terms of robust and intensive development. Alex King has been an active developer for some time but that doesn’t mean this particular app will move forward, and it’s not a sourceforge type project.
Without a lot of investigation and critique there is something I don’t like about Gallery. Coppermine seems to be a clone of gallery, I like the presentation a lot better, and it appears to be more flexible. Yet it too is still an early project that needs a lot of work.