Photo Database

My work is looking for a solution that would allow our sales team to look through a searchable database of photos of our products using their iPads or phones. We currently have them sync with a single iTunes account when they are in town and use the default photo app to look photos up, but it is a hassle to remember to sync and keep it up to date.

Do any of you know of a solution that would allow our department to upload a library of photos and easily tag them so that we can securely search them on the go? Would iCloud be a good solution? I have heard some people say that it doesn’t really work as advertised, but that might be made up. It will need to be simple enough to explain to employees over the phone since some of them are out of state.

Would dropbox work?

As far as I know you can’t tag images in Dropbox. We will have a couple hundred images and we would like to be able to search through them by different characteristics such as material, construction type and finish so if a client has a question like “have you ever made any bags with a foil logo?” we should be able to search “hot stamp” and have everything we did with a hot stamp show up.

I’m thinking something like a private Flickr account or some other online solution. Should be easy to access, can be managed from home by one or more people, and should support things like tags, searches, etc.

R

Check out Wordpress.org. I made an everyday research blog at my last job where you could tag photos as well as install any website function you can imagine with community supported plug-ins. You could probably find a gallery oriented template similar to a Flickr set up.

We had to host it on our own server for security purposes. It was little tricky at first, but very easy once it got going.

I suggest making friends with your IT people.

Agreed with GEBS, Wordpress or a similar CMS Content Management System running on your own servers would be a low level of difficulty to setup for a database programmer. You need to be able to query a database for tags and/or categories, be able to upload new products and display, extra points to be able to format specifically for the devices doing the request. This could be done with an existing CMS platform like Wordpress, I have written applications in PHP that accomplished the same thing for manufacturer’s database of helmets, it is basic database stuff, the biggest work is in formatting for display, again fairly trivial with the right skill set.

Thanks guys for pointing me in the right direction. We ended up going with a Squarespace page. I was getting hung up looking for photo solutions, but once I started looking to site building tools it became a lot easier. Their portfolio app is also a nice bonus for presentations.