On organizing photos

I am looking for a better way to organize my photos. I have a whole lot of them and a lot more are coming.

Currently, I have a somewhat good organization but it is not very convenient to use. I have all pictures in the photos folder. Most of them are sorted into albums by date and name (/photos/year/year-month-day_album-name/). Others are organized into projects. Actually, I’ve had only one project so far – “Picture of the day“. I am using it to store single pictures and pictures which don’t belong to any particular album (/photos/Projects/POTD/year/month/day/). I have also created a Photoblog, which basically shows one picture at a time using the reversed date sort of my “Picture of the day” images.

Locating albums is fast and easy, but they are not adding up at the speed of singled out images. Single images need easier navigation. I’d go even as far as searching. Thus they need tagging or some similar mechanism. I also need a better photoblog with previous/next/today navigation, comments, and RSS feed. I also want to be able to use my images in posts for this blog once in a while. Ideally, I would also want a way for offline browsing of these pictures. In any way, I don’t want to store images in the database – they are just fine on my hard disk.

There is also something else. For some time now I am postprocessing all pictures that I publish. I want the original image to be stored somewhere handy. It shouldn’t be visible from the web, but it should be trivial to find if I need it.

From what I want, it seems that I need some database usage at least. Even if just to store the tags/keyword and comments. If I’d go in this direction, I want it integrated with my blog as much as possible. I want the same user and SPAM control.

I have been looking at different plugins for WordPress, as well as integration of some 3rd party tools. So far I didn’t manage to try any of them.

Do any of you have any suggestions based on my needs? I’d really appreciate it.

Update: Tried Gallery. Doesn’t work for due to the way it integrates to WordPress and impossibility of using EXIF comments as image titles during the import of albums. Other than that, seems to be a good piece of software.

Update: Tried Coppermine and didn’t like it for the above reasons.

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