Well, I finally got around to playing with my Advogato settings and have a play around. It's all very cute.

Over the weekend I realized that I've just taken far too many photos to deal with in any sensible way, so I threw them all in a mySQL database and hacked together the beginnings of a photo management interface in php (and yes, I looked at what was already around, and none of it looked right). So I'll hack on that for a while and see if it looks promising as a new project.

Oh, what am I looking for in photo management?

• Deal with many thousands of photos
• The file which comes out of the camera is the negative: it should always be preserved totally unmodified
• I found my camera (and most digital cameras these days) produce lots of metadata in EXIF format; I want to make use of it.
• Remember which way is up. Why don't photo management systems remember the aspect ratio without munging the image?
• More generally, I want to store the original image + a series of transformations, rather than just storing a hacked up bitmap. It would be doubly nice if I can convince Gimp to remember things that way too.
• Sure, remember descriptions, titles, keywords, etc, but also remember links between photos. With enough links, it's a much better way of browsing than simply stepping through one by one.

I hacked up a simple browse-by-date page as a PHP learning exercise, and it turned into a visual diary. An interesting result.