Know of a good taggable photo sharing tool (that's not Flickr)?

Hi. Here at Interplast, we have thousands of pictures from all over the world, collected haphazardly for years. I'm looking for a way to create a library that anyone in our office can use when they need a picture of, say... a girl with a cleft lip from Puno, Peru. Many of our pictures are used for print materials, so we need to give our staff members easy access to the orignial file, not just a web-compatible compressed version. Basically, I'd love to find a program or service that allows me to tag photos and group them so others can search under keywords (location, gender, age, malady, severity, etc.) to fliter out the most relevant ones.

We use Flickr (here's our page) to post our pics to our blog, but the problem with Flickr is that I can't figure out a way to have people download the full image (the little one always comes out too grainy).

So...does anyone know of a tool we could use that would allow numerous users access to the full files of pics, that could be searched by relevant keywords added by me? I'm open to a web-based service or a piece of software that would run on our server and be accessible by our networked computers. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Hi,

I don't use Flickr so I don't know if there is a better tool for you or not. Is the original size the only problem you have? Does Flickr do everything else you want? If it does everything else then here is the official word from their site.

If you have a free account, no-one (including you) can access your original file. If you choose to upgrade to Pro they will become available.

If you have a pro account, your original files are available for download. There is a global setting in your account where you can specify who you will allow to download originals: Only You, Your Friends and/or Family, Your Contacts, Any Flickr User (Recommended), or Anyone.

You might want to consider upgrading to the paid account. For $24.95 per year (slightly cheaper for 2 year account) it maybe cheaper then the time spent to find a new service and reorganizing all your photos. The only limitation I see (at quick glance) is the 2GB upload per month.

Flickr Upgrade Info

Ming

Seth:

I might be missing something here ... but you can do what you describe in flickr. Why change?

When I click through to your flickr account to say one of your photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/interplast/176889549/

There are several options in small print on the upper left side of the photo - that say:
add to favs, add note, blog this, all sizes.

If you click the all sizes button, it takes you to a page that gives you a variety of sizes to download, including the large size.

Now, I can see this because I have a flickr account, I'm one of your contacts, and you have the right CC license on it.

So, the simple solution would be to either have staff who need to access the those photos set up flickr accounts (heck they're free) and you make them contacts or give them the login to your interplast account so they can download the pictures.

If folks beyond staff members need access, make them a contact.

Personally, I would stick with flickr because you've already made an investment in uploading photos and from the little browsing of your stream - you have annotated them and tagged them pretty well - you just need to organize them into sets.

There are some alternates photo sharing services -- I need to go dig up an article I have that lists a few.

Seth, it looks like you have a pro account?

Anyway, as promised here are some good places to seek out other photo tagging services:

http://www.emilychang.com/go/ehub/category/C34
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6451_7-6245099-1.html
http://learntech.pbwiki.com/TryPhotosharing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_sharing

I know, not a specific recommendation - but I personally am such a big flickr fan that I haven't looked at others.

Maybe you could ask this guy over at Educause what he discovered:
here

Let me know what you discover!

Ming and Beth,

Thanks! I didn't know that I could toggle the download size in Flickr with my pro account. I checked it out and it looks like I can just give everyone in the office our account info and then teach them (as you have just taught me) how to download a print-worthy file size. The 2GB limit seems fine for me, I'll just upload 2GB per month until I'm done.

Once again, thank you so much for your responses. I've been stewing about this problem for a while, and just realized this weekend that there was probably a simple solution out there. Thanks for pointing me to it! This will make our staff more efficient by decreasing wasted staff time, allowing us to spend donor money on more important things.