Photo storage options

<p>Hi all<br>

I am working for an NGO and we have officers in the field. As part of a site we wish to develop we would like a solution like Smugmug that will allow multiple login names and passwords so we can allow remote staff to have access to upload and we know who has uploaded which photos. <br /><br />Is there an existing solution for this or will we have to get a developer to create a front end solution to work with a smugmug like site. The usual features are needed including fields for title, copyright and caption as well as keywords etc with a preference that some of those are mandatory fields for successful uploading. <br /><br />Thoughts on this anyone? <br /><br />Thanks again<br /><br />John</p>

<p>While you <em>sort of</em> need a developer to put something like this together, the tools are readily available and really just need to be put together on the server that will host the content management system.<br /><br />A framework like Drupal (open source, free to license) running on a simple LAMP stack (free operating system, web server software, and database software) taking advantage of a few readily available (and also free) modules to manage that sort of content ... just works. All content is mapped to its contributors, and can support as many optional or required fields as you like - visible or not to variously categorized types of users. <br /><br />The key to something like that is having a clear vision of the user experience you want your contributors, administrators, and public visitors (if any) to have so that whoever is installing the modules that manage that experience and the underlying data can get closer to getting it right on the first try.<br /><br />The ... <em>other</em> key is making sure that the content is hosted someplace where you're getting good backups and the system administrators are at least reasonably familiar with the CMS (content management system, like Drupal) that you're choosing to use - so they can make sure the whole thing is performing well and can scale if you get a lot of traffic or you start accumulating very large piles of image data. <br /><br />Getting all of that lined up correctly is not difficult, but is best done by somebody who has experience with the CMS you choose to use. For the example I cited (Drupal) there are literally thousands of companies - from large enterprises to specialty mom-and-pop operations or college students - who could easily get the ball rolling, and leave you with something that can still be modified as your needs evolve. <br /><br />Do NOT have something custom built for this use. Use a popular framework and well supported modules. They exist in abundance to handle the sort of things that you describe here.</p>

<p>Thanks for that advice Matt. I will take a look at those options. I may indeed go for a developer for this. I want the experience to be like smugmug which pretty much has everything we are looking for but you can only do one admin login and an assistant login and I would like to be able to manage that side of it much better. </p>

<p>A proper CMS like Drupal gives you unlimited abilities to set up users/admins with very granular control over who can see and do what. </p>