I got fantastic feedback when I recently asked about a personal wiki that would fit my criteria [2], so I figure I'll ask here for a photo library management app.
My use case isn't just personal photos, but also concept art. I would love to replace the scourge that is Pinterest (which I shamefully admit I use). I used Picasa for this use case before it died.
Here are the features I would like in a photo management system:
- Importing photos should be as easy as drag and drop or "add directory".
- Images in the library should be mirrored to an internal store independent of the greater filesystem.
- It needs to support rich tagging. Images should be easily enumerable by tag.
- It needs to store all metadata in a central database or file that I can easily distribute and back up. (As opposed to writing the data into the images directly.) It would be nice if the primary keys to image were signature-based rather than filename (and especially not full file path) as it could live on different systems.
- Group by GPS coordinates would be nice. Even better if it can pull the location name.
- Group by date taken.
- Find or automatically ignore/remove duplicates.
- Support for a NAS or cloud backup would be fantastic. Especially if it also backs up the database.
- It should generate pre-computed thumbnails so scrolling a large library doesn't show blank images, but keep them off to the side so it doesn't impact backup.
- It should have RAW support, but doesn't need editing/adjustment capabilities. (If not available, I suppose I could pre-process the RAWs.)
- Video support would be extremely nice too, but it doesn't need to have any editing or miscellaneous features.
- It would be nice to keep galleries separate, or at least in different namespaces so I can reuse tags. Family, real estate, conceptual/renders, etc.
- Replication across multiple devices would be a nice to have, especially if it can update tags and metadata across machines.
- Open source would be nice, but I'd be happy with paid/commercial software if it did what I wanted.
- Multiplatform support (Linux, Windows, Mac) would be extremely nice. Even nicer if it supports mobile too.
- It should be snappier than a web-based gallery.
- That said, internet web access (like photos.google.com) would be killer.