Photo sharing, storing, archiving

It was my 5 year old’s daughter’s birthday yesterday (Nov 17, 2007) and we took only a few photos of the event. After filling up the camera’s internal CF card with all the photos we’ve taken over the past few months, it was time to save them somewhere and empty the card again.

This is where my insanity begins.

For years, I have been looking for something… anything… that does the following functions well:

• categorize photos, possibly with sub-categories, allowing a photo to belong to multiple categories
• group photos by date, location, subject, etc. independent of category
• allow a grading system to sort photos by quality
• access to photos via Internet, viewing with all the above features, and reasonable privacy (don’t want personal photos where just anyone can see them unless given permission)

Some of the online photo sharing services seem to cover that, but not really in a “photographer’s archive” sort of way. Flickr, Photobucket, etc. seem to be more of “hobbyists portfolio” type, showcasing a few photos so that friends and family can look at them cheaply.

This might be a job for the Gallery2 software that I already use for my music video collection…

UPDATE: After reading this post, I learned about a few other photo sharing/hosting services, and pixamo.com might be a good fit.