[Leica] Photo database software suggestions?

[Adam Bridge]

> On 2016 Feb 3, at 8:11 AM, kyle cassidy on the LUG <leicaslacker at gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

> I want to have a searchable database that allows me 
> 
> 	a) to add metadata to files and allow me to search that metadata.
> 	b) automate identification of people through facial recognition or import data like that
> 	c) allow me to grant varying levels of access to this database to other people (mark
> 		some directories with different permissions, etc.)
> 	d) Not vanish in 10 years leaving me with a useless database
> 	e) have a solution to the fact that I’m going to have dozens of files with the same filename
> 
> 
> Cost isn’t an object, but functionally is a must.

You have a few challenges here.

c) is a huge issue. There’s an implication that you’re going to want to have this, somehow, floating on either an intra-net or the internet as a whole (bad idea, by the way). Being able to restrict entire chunks is a real data-base issue you’ll have to design for. I don’t know of any consumer-level application that can do this, although I’ve never searched for one.

d) really? what planet do you live on? 10 years from now is so far in the future that it’s beyond prediction. Assume that you’ll have to unload all your data from whatever solution you can find and then reload it into another solution.

e) I don’t see this as an issue, frankly, because they’re going to be initially located inside the carefully curated file-tree that you’ve already created.

a) is straightforward with products like Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom. As long as you keep your metadata in “side-car” files you’ll be able to walk away from Lightroom and have all that meta-data that can be captured by something else.

b) amazingly Lightroom does this pretty well although it’s a pain to actually do it.


Unspoken through all of this is: how the hell will you maintain the integrity of your image data. We don’t talk about that very much here - or at all. Our consumer file systems and, for the most part, our computer’s internal memory, don’t deal with errors well. When you copy an image from one location to another how do you KNOW the images are identical? Drop a byte or two in the wrong place and you’ve got problems.

If I were starting from scratch I’d probably look for a Linux solution with great hardware, high quality RAIDs for on-line storage, and then compute check-sums for everything. Follow up with a high-quality backup to the cloud, I use Amazon myself AND Backblaze and another set of hard-drives you keep in an appropriate off-site vault.

When I was returning from Africa I visited with an archivist from the UN whose work has been to document the Rwandan Genocide (cheery topic). Everything text gets microfilmed because no mater what they know they can read that. I didn’t get to ask how they handled photographs and video beyond her frustration with the difficulty it presents to archivists.

I know there are folks here who do this sort of thing for a living and who worry about it at a depth far beyond my ability. I hope they’ll contribute their own thoughts.

For me I just use Lightroom. It works. The files stand free on the file-system as does the meta data. Adobe will die after me.

Adam