[consulting] Developer Wanted: Metadata Aware Quick Uploader Module

[Brian Puccio]

Current Image Gallery Metadata Landscape
Many people are using applications such as iPhoto and Picasa to  
manage their photos. Professionals and serious hobbyists are delving  
into the new applications, Aperture and Lightroom. These applications  
are what many consider DAM or digital asset management applications.  
These applications are all geared to handle two tasks: image  
adjustments (white balance, cropping, grayscale conversions, basic  
clone and stamp tools, etc) and metadata handling. I'd like to see  
Drupal work hand in hand with these applications.

With regard to the second task of metadata, photos often have tons of  
metadata embedded (either in the JPEG or the RAW file formats) such  
as date, time, shutter speed, focal length, flash, exposure  
compensation, ISO, camera model, etc. The above DAM applications also  
allow shutterbugs to easily fill in relevant IPTC fields such as  
title (which would map to node title), keywords (taxonomy using  
tags), caption (node body), etc. Combined, there is a wealth of  
relevant information embedded in the photos. Many photographers like  
to see the more technical information when browsing online galleries  
(indeed, Gallery already has support for such features). More casual  
users would like to easily browse their images by tag (which is  
mapped from the IPTC keywords field).

Currently, there are plugins written for Aperture and iPhoto to allow  
exporting to flickr. Lightroom's export module creates webpages that  
can be uploaded, but currently interface with any online CMS. Rather  
than create plugins for each of the above DAM applications to  
interface to Drupal via XMLRPC, I would like to see a mass import  
module that has the following features.

Metadata Aware Quick Uploader Module
MAQUM would simply allow a user (with the correct permissions) to  
upload an image and from that image's metadata, would automagically  
fill in the right metadata, stored in taxonomy. (The image would be  
exported from the DAM software to any place temporarily on the user's  
harddrive.) Significantly, the date and time would be filled in for  
the creation of the node. The title of the node would come from  
IPTC's title field. The node body, which would describe the photo in  
a bit of detail would come from IPTC's caption field. Further, the  
images could be tagged in the DAM with terms such as sunset, beach,  
children, water, ocean, etc and these terms would automagically be  
populated into a specified vocabulary.

Going further, shutter speed could be its own vocabulary and using  
something nifty like the views module would allow you to say show me  
all photos taken with an exposure of over 5 minutes. Focal length,  
flash, exposure compensation, etc would all be their own  
vocabularies. Special styling of the display of image nodes and their  
associated metadata (which would now be found in Drupal's wonderfully  
powerful taxonomy) would complete the picture.

An added bonus would be allowing a user to upload mutiple files  
somehow (either a "hot directory" to watch for or maybe as simple as  
a tarball or zip of images).

Money Where My Mouth Is
I am not a programmer. I can futz with Drupal, but I am most  
certainly not a programmer. I'll pony up $350 towards this. (Some  
stuff might be able to be cribbed from EXIF module and ajaxgallery,  
in which case, I'd forward some funds to the respective developers.)

(Originally posted to http://drupal.org/node/93915)
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