In-house stock photo software/service

<p>I attend a large church that frequently needs all types of photos for things ranging from newsletters to wall art. There's a group of a couple dozen photographers (amateur & professional) in our church (myself included) that are frequently asked to contribute to such needs, but only on an as-needed bases. The church wants to setup a stock photo site to house photos which are for the church's private use, but to which any of our group of approved photographers can contribute whenever they like. It would be the photographer's responsibility to upload & tag photos appropriately, but then the church staff could search the gallery whenever they needed a certain type of shot. From the staff's perspective, it would work much like any of the professional stock photo agencies, except it would be open only to a select group of people.</p>

<p>This seems like a reasonable thing to set up, but we're having trouble finding any software or 3rd party service that will do this for us. The best they've found so far is box.net, which is really more of a file sharing & collaboration tool than a stock photo site, and I don't envision it working very well for what they want. Do any of you have any suggestions on what we should use? I imagine the number of photos in our collection will number in the thousands within the first year or two based on what I've seen our group produce so far.</p>

 

<p>You might want to base something like that around an open-source content management system like Drupal, which will run on a standard Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP stack. Very vanillia hosting, and it could run in-house on an internal server at the church, if you want to save on hosting and bandwidth. Easy to back up that way, too.<br /><br />The point: CMS's like Drupal allow you to define content types, define which users can see/add/update certain types of content, and can treat uploaded images as hunks of content, including custom fields to support things like tagging/captioning. Further, there are plenty of free modules that will allow the server to render thumbnails and other resolutions of the image as the file is transferred - which takes care of a lot of the housekeeping.<br /><br />Drupal has a learning curve - but the support out there is pretty good. What you're describing would be pretty easy to implement, and the good news is that all of the user/security stuff just... works.<br /><br />Something to consider, anyway.</p>

<p>Thanks, I'll look into that. Professionally, I've been a Unix sysadmin & C programmer for the last 20 years, so LAMP stacks don't scare me. The church IT guy (who I just found out was never even consulted about this project) is open to Linux, so that's good. I've never messed with Drupal and know nothing about it other than having heard the name before. Do you know if there are modules for Drupal that cater specifically to cataloging images rather than just treating them like normal files?</p>

<p>Storage space and backups might be an issue. I'm not sure what the in-house capacity is for such things. I'm assuming any remote service would handle backups for us. Uploads will mostly be from outside the church and downloads mostly from inside, so the bandwidth is probably a wash.</p>