Local Network Picture Viewer?

[Xsorovan]

Hello everyone,
Looking for a tool that will allow me to access a share on a local network server that will display pictures and tags on the pictures from almost any machine on the domain.

Currently we have lots and lots of pictures in folders and the people that need those photos spends hours each week sorting through them in windows explorer and it's really obnoxious. Something like Picasa locally that everyone could access would be great.

Thoughts?

 

[Gooberlx2]

Windows Live Photo Gallery would probably work well.

 

[jarsoffart]

I find irfanview to be good.

 

[Jeff7181]

I don't get why they spend hours sorting through them in Windows Explorer... folders... file names... thumbnails... what's missing?

 

[Modelworks]

You need a DAM.
http://www.montala.net/resourcespace.php

 

[QuixoticOne]

Windows live / vista photo gallery will help in that it can index pictures in a tree of sub-folders and give you
a thumbnail browser view of them. You can tag photos too.

Software like Adobe Bridge or Adobe LightRoom or Adobe Photo Album or the
Macintosh equivalent iPhoto would probably do it for you.

There are other programs like bluemarine and so on that would do it.
For LINUX there's F-Spot and others.

Here's a good list of some options:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...rison_of_image_viewers

Caveat emptor, I'd set READ ONLY permission on your shared photos and directories and make them
owned by a user other than any of the users that will browse them, or they'll get accidentally
modified / deleted by various people and programs accessing them.

Originally posted by: Xsorovan
Hello everyone,
Looking for a tool that will allow me to access a share on a local network server that will display pictures and tags on the pictures from almost any machine on the domain.

Currently we have lots and lots of pictures in folders and the people that need those photos spends hours each week sorting through them in windows explorer and it's really obnoxious. Something like Picasa locally that everyone could access would be great.

Thoughts?

 

[QuixoticOne]

Oh Xnview and faststone image viewer would both more or less work on shared network mapped drives
too, but they might not quite be as flexible as you need.

 

[AleleVanuatu]

You want to tag them as well, that won't work with regular fast picture viewers. ResourceSpace looks good cept it will need a local MySQL/PHP install. Ugh. Any other ideas people?

 

[QuixoticOne]

If your only problem with one of them is a MySQL/PHP install, I'd suggest to just not be afraid of it and do it. I'm not sure if "local" means somewhere on your network (which seems reasonable to me), or if it means "on every one of the local machines that is viewing the photos" (which WOULD be ridiculous IMHO).

These days you can easily install MySQL/PHP even on Windows or Macintosh platforms, and it is the next best thing to a trivial default on LINUX/UNIX. If installing it / managing it (and it is hardly difficult) on Windows/Mac, you can even run it alongside with a purpose dedicated UNIX/LINUX guest in a virtual machine on any of your Windows/Mac/UNIX/LINUX host platforms. VMWare server might be free (I'm not sure about for commercial use), and they have a ton of basically ready to go LAMP (linux + mysql + php) virtual appliances you can just download and fire up with little configuration.

There are also programs like:
http://www.softimage.com/products/alienbrain/
http://www.imgseek.net/
http://thomas.deselaers.de/FIRE
http://www.semanticmetadata.net/features/

This is an OK image viewer, though I don't know where it stores its tags i.e. if it is non-destructive to the source image, also depending on your network implementation it may or not be as smooth as viewing them from a local drive. I expect that with a proper network it'll be fine.
http://faststone.org/

 

[Modelworks]

If you have the budget there is nothing out there that beats alienbrain for asset management.
That comes with a price though, lowest possible install will cost about $2k for the software.

 

[AleleVanuatu]

QuixoticOne, I'm not afraid of MySQL, in fact, have been using it since version 3, circa 1998. So LoL to that. It's just GROSS, is all.

Now then, to Alien Brain etc, trusting your data to closed-source crap is setting yourself up for complete fail. metadata is data as well, and requires real-time and effort. Simply put, the minute you become beholden to a crappy company, or even a not-so-crappy company, you can really get screwed hard.

I looked at all your links and don't see anything that is even close to polished that will do what the OP wants to do.