Some time ago I mocked up a prototype of something that never took off --- I still use the prototype...
See e.g. an example with two of your pub signs.
It has the advantage of "knowing" what I've previously annotated with, i.e. the concepts I've seen and the people I've met.
Yes, Morten, that's the sort of thing I'm thinking about at the moment. Only on a local web server and with thumbnails, baked rather than fried.
I played around with one of, these, when I get the time I want to do some RDF organization with the ideas contained by both of these guys:
http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/discovery/2003/06/codepictjs/
http://www.kanzaki.com/docs/sw/image-rdf.html
The latter has a nice mixture of using FOAF and RDF versions of Wordnet Enjoy!
What works for me is storing the photos in a date-based directory tree so every image file ends up with a path of the form:
YYYY/MM/DD/imagefilename
I wrote a Python script to read the "date taken" EXIF field and copy the file to the appropriate directory. Sometimes (if I'm not feeling lazy), I will use gthumb to add comments to the photos. I should actually say "associate" rather than "add" as gthumb stores the comment in a separate file. BTW, I have started playing with F-Spot and it normally stores its metadata in an SQLite database, ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db. I believe it can be configured to add metadata as an IPTC header.
While I'm usually too lazy to add metadata, I find that date-based storage system is usually sufficient to find a photo when I'm looking for it.
Weird, i just started trying to tackle this problem last night. I've decided to try digiKam out (as per Mark's suggestion). It has an external, SQLite db that i can play with. So far so good.
The same question happens so many times in weblogs and discussion, that it would be really worthwhile to create a *very* simple *public* API for photos album. A kind of local flickr for those who wants.
I find that Phil Harvey's exiftool (perl script) http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/ is great for manipulating EXIF and IPTC information, and I've been using Picasa on both linux and Windows for viewing and browsing -- the beta windows version from http://picasaweb.google.com/ can geocode photos and ties in with googleearth.
On my linux box I used kimdaba (now known as kphotoalbum), which is pretty cool. You can annotate with people, location and keywords... it stores the annotations in xml which could be rdf'ized quite easily.
Alas, I now use a mac and although theoretically possible i've not tried to compile kphotoalbum here, so i'm stuck with iphoto, which is just about jusable if you add keyword assistant...
I also started my own annotation tool a while ago, but I stopped when my colleague asked me if I was going to write a text-editor afterwards... (PySwim: http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~grimnes/dev/pyswim/)
I was looking for something similar a couple months ago. There are skads of packages for creating an album for display, far fewer for cataloging. But I stumbled upon zoph last week which looks pretty good; I'm going to give it a try.
I think a great solution is to use XMP to embed RDF into the image. See http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/ That way all the metadata (description, tags, etc) can be embedded into the file and stays with the file.
Unfortunately, I haven't found any open source and/or linux tools that let you work with XMP nor any photo gallery software that uses it.
XMP, All softwares from Adobe are using the data. Flickr uses them to automatically put the description, keywords (tags), title, etc.
Software
perl module to parse XMP
have you tried greenstone.org ?
Mapivi (http://mapivi.de.vu) is an open-source and cross-platform (UNIX, Mac OS X and Windows) picture manager. You may add, edit and search keywords, location, caption, headline, rating etc. All information will be stored in the picture itself (IPTC, EXIF or JPEG comment) and a small database to enable fast searches. You may combine Mapivi with any other picture tool supporting the IPTC standard; you're not bound to use it forever. Mapivi will work with any picture folder structure (no need to import your pictures).
Regards Martin
XnView is the best solution as far as I checked. It's not GPL, just freeware. But works better and faster than mapivi for example. It doesn't know any XMP. And it is quite cross-platform. There is an older version compiled as Linux native, but I say use the Windows version with Wine - a few glitches, but not crashes. Doesn't know catalogues either or uploading, but it has a nice HTML/webpage export which is quite flexible.
What about JAlbum (http://www.jalbum.net)? It's written in Java and it comes with a GUI. It supports EXIF (default option), IPTC and XP data.