Photo Tracking: Releases, Subjects, Versions, Metadata, etc

Hey all,

I’m brainstorming my next app and want to make sure I’m not doing work
that someone has already done (probably better than me!).

I’m a high school teacher and the school’s web/print designer. I need
an organized way to track my media. 99% of the time that is going to
mean photos, but we also shoot the occasional video or take audio
recording. For each of these records I need to track:

  • The subjects that appear in them
  • The media release status of each subject
  • The original media itself (thank you file column!!!)
  • Additional versions of the media (thumbnails, jpgs of RAW images,
    alternate codec video/audio, etc)
  • Other metadata (previous usages, timestamping, author, etc)

Then I want to put together controllers that allow actions like…

  • Easily link directly to media in the archive
  • Easily upload new media
  • List media containing a specified subject or subjects
  • Create a “game” where an authenticated user identifies subjects in the
    media (mostly to get our security guards, who know the name of every
    kid, to identify them for me!)
  • Other obvious administrative actions (delete, edit, etc)

Has anyone done something similar? Anyone interested? I’d be happy to
modify/extend an existing project, collaborate on a new project, or just
have some beta testers.

Thanks,
Jeff

I plan to build something similar to what you described, but I’m new to
Ruby on Rails. Keep me posted on your progress. I hope to get started
in about 4 weeks.