open source photo album software? [closed]

Question

I have a friend who had been using a proprietary photo album product and reached a hard limit on the number of photos. He managed to export the data to spreadsheet format (including image filenames) plus he of course saved the image files themselves. He says there doesn't seem to be any other product that can import this format.

Is there any open source photo album software (preferably on Windows) that would be easy to modify to allow it to import this spreadsheet data? Or is there perhaps another solution I'm not thinking of?

Answer 1

Consider using the IPTC/XMP image metadata. If the files don't already have the right metadata, you might be able to add it from your spreadsheet using something like http://www.exiv2.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_photo_gallery_software (See IPTC support column)

Answer 2

Phraseanet is Open Source now, the version 3.1 has just been released. It's a professional application for Windows/Mac/Linux. You can try it (ask a demo access on www.alchemy.fr) or download it for free here: http://www.phraseanet.com/en/download/

Answer 3

Gallery is a well known PHP solution to host an photo album. Its open source and in PHP, so I don't believe it would be that difficult to add an importing component into it. Also, it is based on a database, which means that you can import the data from the spreadsheet (as a CSV file) directly into the hosting database.

Answer 4

Under windows I use Google Picasa and under Linux I use Digikam and KPhotoAlbum.

Edit: Digikam now available for Windows.