Every photographer needs to have a way to store and manage the photographs. Just copying the photo files into your C drive with the file manager is not really an option. One of the most common choices is to use management software like Apple's Aperture, Adobe's Lightroom or Google's Picasa. Another way to go is to use pure on-line systems, like Flicr, SmugMug or Photobucket, few to mention. These are things people commonly use.

Well, not me. I decided to build up own database system for storing the photographs. I made the first version already in 2004, but the work was seized because I didn't have any more time to put into the project. Finally, during the last Xmas holidays I had some time to put the system back up and running.

The reasons to build own system are:

  • I wanted to have less dependency over any service or software vendor or used equipment. The database should be available for next fifty years. :)

  • For me, a photograph is not a single RAW or jpeg file with regular Exif data, but information about the photograph, such as comments and descriptions, and maybe several image files (original RAW plus versions for different purposes).

  • The database should be accessible from anywhere, have reliable but huge data storage and easy interface.

So, I ended up into having a following setup in my home basement:

  • NAS (Network Attached Storage) to store image files. Currently I have Netgear ReadyNas NV+ with one terabyte capacity. The NAS is fully redundant, meaning any of the hard drives can fail without loosing data. Additionally data will be regularly back-uped into a portable hard drive, and power is fed through a UPS.

  • Cheap laptop running a apache web server with MySQL on top of Ubuntu, to provide web based database access. Currently I'm giving a try to a lent first generation Eee PC. These “netbooks” are wonderful for the purpose: integrated display and keyboard for console access, no moving parts such as hard disks to break down and a small power consumption by nature.

I call my application “Photosadmin”. It is done from scratch with a PHP language, using some 3rd party scripts e.g. for Exif extraction. Being a web application, the database is fully accessible for me from any computer over Internet, using secured SSL connection. The most notable features of Photosadmin are:

  • Single-click action to upload a Canon RAW file: the system creates a directory for a photograph into the NAS, uploads the RAW, reads the Exif data out the file, makes a thumbnail jpeg and provides a form to add any additional information like topic, description, location information and so on.

  • Any file assosiated to the photograph can be easily downloaded, for example for editing. Interface provides possibility to upload and assosiate any new file to the photograph (e.g. edited version of the image).

  • Instead of an album concept, the system provides possibility to create “exhibitions”. Any photograph can belong to any exhibitions. This eliminates need to hard categorize a photograph into a three structure. The system provides a simple drop-down menu to view any exhibition (list of thumbnails).

The next step would be to integrate the system into a CMS (content management system) such as Drupal, but now I will concentrate on taking those photographs to store into the database :). I want also publish the PHP code, but some clean up work need to be done first.

Having this database also means that I can dig out some old photographs I used to have in the PhotoStories site and re-publish those in this blog. Just picked couple of those into this article.

So, stay tuned to see some stunning photo work! ;-)