"Before I dealt with huge collections as a developer" says the comment I responded to. 88k is not a huge collection of anything from a software development perspective.
The compilation of that collection is obviously more considerable. Archivists at Getty have already said it is about 10 years work for ~20 people.
> I didn't consider how much intellectual work went into managing collections as entities
I wasn't talking about the software development side, and I certainly wouldn't call the tech end of this a significant part of the 'intellectual work.' Organizing and managing 88k images is something my laptop 10 years ago wouldn't balk at, serving them is something a low-tier vps could do, and supporting CRUD apps for the archivists, etc are usually trivial. I think you're massively underestimating the importance of other people's tasks in these operations. Even as a developer, the people-focused work-- e.g. working with the other teams to strategize about how tech could best suit their processes, training, design iterations, etc.-- was more work than any technical component.
