I'm curious to know what software humanities scholars are using to wrangle large collections of images. I often encounter scholars who struggle to manage large image collections — it's not at all unusual to find people managing collections of historical images with iPhoto — and wondered if there are databases that make sense for visual collections. I'm especially interested in programs that:
- work out of the box and have a GUI (sorry)
- are designed for individuals, not enterprises
- allow a scholar to quickly apprehend many images at once
- allow one to add metadata (like place and date) — something beyond tags would be nice — and construct queries
- make sense for people who have a lot of digital surrogates of primary sources (which is to say, systems that are optimized to retrieve the EXIF data from a photo of an archival document won't make a whole lot of sense)
I know about Picasa, LightRoom, and ImagePlot. I don't think an enterprise-level system like ContenDM or the like makes sense for individual scholars. Omeka, of course, is nice, but it's a bit unwieldy if you're just trying to manage a collection. What am I missing?
