I have been looking for a gallery program that will handle this for literally years.
Coppermine seems to maybe kinda sorta do it but not quite, and Gallery really just doesn’t.
What gives? The supergeeks I know personally, all one of him, assure me that boolean searching is the very definition of “fundamental”. Image galleries are a dime a dozen and there’s endless ways to manipulate metadata.
So why is this so elusive?
Of course, I’ve heard that it’s possible with some otherwise wimpy programs/scripts that would simply collapse under the weight of my archive (something in the 60-70,000 range currently, growing all the time) so it seems my problem is the ability to handle large numbers of images AND do boolean searching.
And of course, I’d love to have all this be able to be integrated into an open source CMS like Joomla or Drupal, whichever I end up using.
But just the search gallery itself would be great.
Mostly, I suspect it is a failure of requirements - not many people want it, so no-one has made the effort to extend the search mechanism to do it. And Boolean searching via a web interface is a tricky thing, due to the need to sanitise and control the query to prevent SQL Injection - in the end, extended queries get dumped into the “too hard” basket - and those of us who would like the feature miss out.
Gallery 3 does not seem to have demo up yet, despite having hit Release Candidate 1 - I need to upgrade my server to try it (php5, mysql5), but will be starting to do so shortly. My eventual plan is to set up Gallery 3 as a backend data store, then look at modifying DigiKam (which has a great workflow/editing front end) to access the datastore/database directly, so that changes reflect in the web interface without rescanning, and I can use the tagging system in Digikam to catch up on tagging all the historic photos I have.