Best way of managing photo libraries?

[DarthTedious]

My wife and I currently have separate photo libraries on our separate Windows user accounts (both managed by Picasa). However, there is some overlap between the libraries (we've often imported the same photos into them straight from the camera). There are also a load of photos on a Macbook, again with some overlap with our libraries on the PC. I also have some old photos on an external hard drive somewhere. Again, there may be some overlap between those and the photos elsewhere.

I am about to do a fresh install (Win 7) and when I do so I would like to have a single library (ultimately I would like this on a NAS but for now it will have to be local).

1) How do I bring the pictures from all these sources together without having lots of duplicate photos where there was overlap between the sources (but preferably preserving any existing folders so I can still find stuff), and without losing anything obviously?

2) Once I have all the pictures in one place, what's the best way of managing them so that either of us can import photos to the same shared library and both of us can easily access them? (I read that Picasa doesn't do shared libraries, but maybe I can have individual libraries indexing the same pictures...? or use something other than Picasa, although I do quite like it?)

Grateful for any suggestions!

[aidanjt]

Use the public folder as the primary library store?

[Saracen]

"Best" way? Something like Adobe Lightroom, or Extensis Portfolio.

Not cheap, though.

I seem to remember ACDSee doing something like this too, at a more mainstream price, but I haven't used it for quite a while.

[peterb]

Long term, you might want to look at Gallery http://gallery.menalto.com/ Version 3 has just been released, so I'd stick with V2 at the moment, hosting it on your own NAS or server.

It needs Apache, MySQL and PHP to run it - on a Linux host you can install those from your distro's repositry. On a windows machine you could use WAMP http://www.wampserver.com/en/

Once you have got the application, he albums can be viewed using a web browser, and anyone can upload files (depending o the permissins you set in the Gallery applicatipon.

The trick is to have a central repositry for the images, and then create virtual albums from that library (which you would carefully back-up of course!)

Is it the best way? Debateable - depends on your level of expertise, but the advantage is that the source images are only in one place, and the virtual albums all use just one source. It certainly works well for me - others might say it is overkill.

As for your current set up. Ensuring no duplicates is the tricky one, because you need to get al the images in one place. They are 'only' files so there might be some duplicate detection software you could use. As for preserving the current albums, that might be tricky, but so long as the original images are preserved, and have some sort of catalogueing, they can be created.

I (using Gallery) have a central directory with all the images. I store them on date_subject folder basis (2010_holiday_France for example) so when I create the album, the files are easier to find.

The other advantage of a central system is that you can create more than one album from the same set of images. So you might have an album "Holidays" that contains all the images from that holiday, with a second album called (for example) Historic buildings, which contains images from the 2010_Holiday_France directory and (eg) 2009_Holiday_Italy directory.