Participant

Question

How to publish large image collection with keyword navigation

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
September 16, 2018
3 replies
880 views

I‘m looking for suggestions about publishing 2,000 or more images on the web for our historical society. Our museum’s image collection has keywords from a custom controlled vocabulary which provides a great way to navigate them in Lightroom CC Classic on the desktop. This works very well for in-person visitors working with our archivist. Now we want the public to enjoy similar online web search features by exposing our keyword tags and hierarchy in the image browser.

Does Adobe offer an image publishing feature for the web that shows keywords and hierarchy for navigation?

What other vendors offer web image catalog products with good keyword support?

I looked at candidate solutions from Adobe. As far as I can tell, Adobe Behance doesn’t show keywords and is intended for small (a few dozen) images in collections. Adobe Stock Image is good with a large number of images but they’re all in the big pool of millions of photos that are unrelated to our museum. There are uncountable WordPress plugins for image galleries but I can’t find any that handle keywords, hierarchies, or thousands of photos. The best example websites that habe good keyword nav is e.g. Getty Images and iStockPhoto but they don’t show hierarchies and are designed for eCommerce (our museum does not sell online).

We manage our photo collection with Photo Mechanic and with Lightroom CC Classic. Our museum volunteers have put hundreds of hours in preparing and keywording our digital pictures. Our first collection of 2,000 is ready to go on the web, and we intend to publish thousands more over the next few years.

Now all we need is a web framework. Thanks in advance for suggestions. I’m a programmer and web developer that can probably handle customizing most anything that offers a good foundation.

Barry

I hope this is an appropriate forum; kindly redirect me if not.

This topic has been closed for replies.

barryhaAuthor

Participant

Conclusion: I ended up writing our own web server software to display Lightroom images that are tagged with hierarchical keywords. It's general solution in that it reads all keywords and the hierarchy directly from the set of uploaded images. All of our image management is done in Adobe Lightroom Classic.
The server software is open source: https://github.com/barry-ha/Lightroom-nested-keywords

A small working demo: http://nestedkeywords.com/

Our large public website: https://photos.shorelinehistoricalmuseum.org/photo-gallery.html

I hope people find it useful. ~Barry~

Tony_See

Inspiring

I would start by putting this question to the Dreamweaver forum but perhaps re-frame your needs somewhat to solicit an answer from coders who deal with database drive outcomes.

You say you would be confident with that so that may work.

I have not referred it to that forum yet, but can if you like.

barryhaAuthor

Participant

Thanks for the pointer and offer, Tony. I'll review the Dreamweaver forum and can post the question myself. I'll study them and couch my question in the right frame of mind to appeal to coders who may have encountered this already. I'm a long-time Dreamweaver user.

I'm sure our local museum is not the only outfit faced with the challenge of publishing a few thousand images and making them easy to find and navigate. Indeed, many photographers at home will easily have a much bigger collection to publish. As such, I'd like to find and exploit an existing solution so I don't have to re-invent the wheel. But, if need be, I can write one myself. It's a SMOP as we'd say in my day job (Simply a Matter of Programming), lol.

Barry

dfconn

Known Participant

I don't know if this is still an open question, but SmugMug allows keyword searches and setting up galleries based on keywords. Example: go to my gallery website for "Today's Image" https://dfconnors.smugmug.com/Todays-Image/

Then search, for example, "France" or "Mexico"...

Hope this was helpful....

johnrellis

Legend

A number of years ago, I looked around for similar Web solutions for a collection of about 5000 hierarchically keyworded photos. I didn't find anything adequate. I ended up using Flickr, which at the time handled non-hierarchical keywords pretty well and made it possible for others to navigate via (non-hierarchical) keyword. But since then Flickr had a botched redesign as their owner Yahoo entered their death spiral, and I stopped using it.

Unfortunately, though there is now an industry standard (since 2010) for storing hierarchical keywords in photo metadata, few if any desktop applications support it, and Web services generally don't. LR and Bridge don't implement the standard -- they use an Adobe-specific method. Adobe has given up on hierarchical keywords -- the new Lightroom CC just provides flat keywords, and even that is grudging, given the antipathy of at least one senior product manager to keywords in general.

Please let us know if you find a good solution.

barryhaAuthor

Participant

Thank you kindly, John. Glad to hear from someone who's been there. Interesting that Flickr gave it a go, and then messed it all up. Really interesting that Adobe doesn't put keywording as a priority. It's mildly astonishing that a good publishing solution isn't already out there and easy to find. I also checked Adobe Portfolio but again it's intended for collections of only a few dozen photos.

It's even more interesting that keyword metadata isn't more widely used and published. I really like how Lightroom CC Desktop supports hierarchical keywords and I use them extensively in my home photo library of 65,000 pictures that span 120 years of family history.

It seems like publishing a few thousand photos would be a common situation. Maybe I should mine GitHub for possible components.

I will let you and everybody else here know if I find anything remotely useful.

Barry

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