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Ideas for a Photo Database

This is just a collection of ideas, which will hopefully at some time evolve into a documentation.

Reason

I recently bought a digital camera. This nice machine creates lots of more or less (depending on the operator's skills) nice pictures, which have slightly descriptive filenames such as mvc-022f.jpg.

I'd like to have a method of enhancing the usefulness of these pictures by adding pieces of information, such as

Data Structure

Relational database (probably MySQL or PostgreSQL), with web-interface (probably using PHP).

Main tables:

Table pictures

One row for each picture.

There is no keyword field, because that's going to be done by categories.

Table piccat

One or more rows for each picture: one for each category, a picture is member of. Intended as a structured replacement of a keyword field.

Table categories

One row for each category. There can be hierarchical sub-categories, e.g. "People/Family/Aunt Jamie" or "Places/Marburg/Castle" or "Events/Holiday 2001" or maybe just "Flowers". Because any single picture can be a member of many categories, you can be quite specific in the categories without risking ambiguities - those can be resolved by placing the picture into multiple categories.

User Interface

To enable networking and eliminate the need of installing client software, I plan to use a web interface. Probably these forms will be needed:

Something special will be needed for a quick (otherwise the system will not be used) entry of the association of pictures with categories. Perhaps something with frames will be needed, specifying the current picture ID in the URI of the categories frame and the current category ID in the URI of the picture frame. The alternative would be to use cookies, which aren't my favourite style element.

Special Functions

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Last updated: 05.05.2007 17:43:19 Martin Stut, email: email address as image, Marburg, Germany
URL: http://www.stut.de/photodb.html