Looking for an internet-accessible photo database -- preferably free

In My Humble Opinion (IMHO)
#1

For a university project, we’re looking for a means to put up a not inconsiderable database of photos, images, videos etc that must be accessible from the internet. Does anyone have any suggestions? There are a few requirements, most notably that it be possible to give descriptive searchable tags to photos and to provide them with source information (i.e., where’s the photo from).

Thanks in advance!

#2

If you can host this yourself, use Gallery2. If you tag the images within the metadata (EXIF/IPTC) before uploading Gallery will create searchable tag indices. Your university services should be able to set this up pretty easily.

Otherwise, you could use Picasa, but the space may be an issue.

Si

#3

Flickr can be free if you only have a small number of photos, or it can cost you US$24.95 per year for unlimited storage – http://flickr.com/help/limits/#28

You can tag photos, arrange them in sets and collections, geotag them so that they can be found on a world map, and comment on each others’ photos.

#4

I use Photobucket for all my craft swaps on Craftster.org. So far, it keeps letting me upload more and more sub-albums, and it’s free! I have been very pleased with it. Flickr has a limit on how much you can upload for free each month, and you can only have three sub-albums without paying for more space. It seems that you can have lots of sub albums on Photobucket, and I sometimes upload tons of craft pics all at once.

Here’s Photobucket:

My album, to give you an idea of how much it can hold (thus far):

Adding titles is easy, and I think you could put a small amount of text there. It wouldn’t hurt to try. :slight_smile:

I don’t know if you can have videos on there, but Photobucket sure can help with your images. :slight_smile:

#5

Thanks for the suggestions, I’ll try those out.

#6

I would highly recommend Picasa… click on “features” and see what it’s got!

It runs, as a free download, on your PC; when you are finished culling, rotating, annotating, fixing, etc you upload them to a web album.

There is a cool feature called a Mapped Album (on the PC side of Picasa it is called Geo-caching), whereby you plot the location of the photo on a map. It works both with Google Maps and Google Earth. Here is the basic example