Looking for a central image database and tagging system for a group of users

Question

I'm doing IT support for a small volunteer organisation who needs to centrally store and organize around 2500 photos. Can anyone here recommend a database or similar system which matches the following criteria:

• Intuitive to use for users with little computer experience
• Multi-user support, ideally with integration in our existing LDAP user directory
• Should have a web-interface
• Not a hosted solution like Picasa (because we have a rather slow internet connection with very slow upload)
• Should allow tagging of images, sorting by various criteria and storing copyright information

If there are native GNOME and/or Windows clients for the tool, that would be a great benefit.

Many thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Check out the Open Source app ResourceSpace. It's very easy to get going and use provided you can setup a Linux server or have one already.

ResourceSpace is a web-based, open source digital asset management system which has been designed to give your content creators easy and fast access to print and web ready assets.

Answer 2

After some issues with ResourceSpace (it has a workflow that is a bit too strict for our non-technical users), I evaluated Menalto's Gallery 3 in the last week. Apart from an almost undocumented LDAP plugin that does not seem to work (yet - I'm working on it), it seems to be a good low-end alternative to ResourceSpace since there are plugins that read IPTC tags and an internal tagging system that makes it easy to tag mass uploads.