So far I have digital pictures from a variety of sources. These include:
- iPhone pictures imported through iPhoto
- Pictures imported from my digital camera
- Pictures received from friends/family via a variety of media
- Scanned pictures that were originally from film
- Pictures on CD-ROM from film developing
Most of these have completely useless filenames. (Side question, why can't digital cameras talk to computers/cell phones via bluetooth, so you can tell your camera I'm at disney world, so name all of my pictures "DisneyWorld_YYYYMMDDHHSS"?). Most of them have missing or invalid metadata (time when the picture was taken).
I want a reasonably easy to use workflow to go from this mess to an organized and easily accessible archive.
I like iPhoto's event model, but it takes lots of work for pictures with invalid/missing dates, and doesn't work for my wife (who uses a PC). I also hate that you cannot rename the underlying file in iPhoto; if you change the picture name, you're changing iPhoto metdata and not the name of the file in the filesystem. I also don't want to have my entire photo library on my PowerBook hard drive; that simply takes too much space.
I'm using Gallery for my photo web site. It has too many cool features and not enough usability for what I want. The photo import & tagging process would need to be greatly improved to meet my objectives. More on this as I make progress in finding an answer.