[support] Drupal for image management, with metadata

[John Callahan]

I have a large collection of images (11,000 at the moment and growing) 
that I'm thinking about using Drupal for.  I'm wondering if anyone has 
experience doing this and what modules would be beneficial.  Using each 
image as a node with a decent taxonomy should work great for search and 
discovery.  Views, lightbox, etc.. would work well for display methods.  
However, three questions I do not know the answer to are:


1) batch upload, even if only one directory
2) reading EXIF/IPTC image metadata and mapping them to taxonomy terms 
and/or CCK fields. 
3) syncing attributes (i.e., edits to raw image EXIF/IPTC can 
update/reimport the node fields/tags and edits to node fields/tags can 
update the EXIF/IPTC metadata.)


I'm using Gallery2 right now (http://gallery.menalto.com/, 
http://drupal.org/project/gallery) and it does some (item #1 and 
partially #2) of what I need.  It even integrates nicely with Drupal for 
users and display of images and albums.   However, I use Drupal for many 
other sites (and I'd like to use views, lightbox, tags, etc...) and 
wondering if I can bypass Gallery altogether.  Any thoughts or 
experiences out there?   Thanks.



- John

**************************************************
John Callahan
Geospatial Application Developer
Delaware Geological Survey, University of Delaware
227 Academy St, Newark DE 19716-7501
Tel: (302) 831-3584  
Email: john.callahan at udel.edu
http://www.dgs.udel.edu
**************************************************