Does anyone have a lead on a framework or service that can handle the storage, display and metadata management for assets of this type online? On a low (non-institutional) budget?
My family has a large number (thousands to tens of thousands) of photographs, sketchbooks and other historical documents that we're in the course of digitising - partly so that they are not lost to posterity but also so that we can share with other branches of the family.
At the moment we have thousands of scans in a massive Dropbox account but it's becoming unmanageable very quickly, and only allows minimal metadata storage. (The quality of the scans is something that we have concerns about but for the moment it's good enough).
Apologies for the slightly unrelated post but I've been mulling this for a while and may see if I can hack something together if nothing is out there already.
I'm working on a personal photo album project (personal as in "for my use only") that kind of matches this. It took me a little under five hours to put together a simple rails site that lives on heroku, handles the uploads and thumbnailing and sticks the whole thing on S3, as well as handling display. Right now the only metadata is "name" and "description" but it's just a postgres database, you can add whatever you want.
Here's the basic app if you want to poke around. There's almost literally nothing to it:
My family has a large number (thousands to tens of thousands) of photographs, sketchbooks and other historical documents that we're in the course of digitising - partly so that they are not lost to posterity but also so that we can share with other branches of the family.
At the moment we have thousands of scans in a massive Dropbox account but it's becoming unmanageable very quickly, and only allows minimal metadata storage. (The quality of the scans is something that we have concerns about but for the moment it's good enough).
Apologies for the slightly unrelated post but I've been mulling this for a while and may see if I can hack something together if nothing is out there already.