What's the best way of cataloging large number of images?

Question

I'm looking at setting a site up with a large number of searchable images, organised by keywords, tags etc. I'm planning to get the image information from the IPTC data. The images will be uploaded by FTP then added into a database. My question is this:

Is there any advantage to storing the IPTC data in the database record for each image or just getting it from the file as and when it's needed?

My gut feeling is that it would be more efficient and easier to work with to have it all in the database but I'd like to make sure before I start to build anything.

Answer 1

I'd certainly put the data into database in some form. You can then ensure that it is indexed and is much faster to search. To get maximum benefit, you would need to preprocess the data into a format that is easy for the database to search. EG keywords should be stored individualy or coded as a many to many relationship (picture_ref, keyword_ref pairs) between the picture and a central list of keywords.