Photography DB

Hello I was just wondering if I could get an estimate for how much it would cost to create a search feature for a photography database I’m working on. Here is a short description: Search of tagged photographs by tag and/or by date and display in a paged format with display of a larger version and download of the original. So, a mock up of the site is available at [login to view URL] There is some authentication code in there so that only University people can view the site, but I disabled it for now so you can view it. There will be two search criteria. Keywords that will be assigned to each photo and the date that it was taken. Both of these, as well as many other variables, will be taken from the header info of the jpg and then parsed into the database. The first thing I need to cover is how the file will be named. Basically it will be exported out of Adobe Lightroom and a program called jhead will extract camera settings and tags or keywords inserted into the file in Lightroom. What we’re thinking is that the name of the file will be the date the photograph was taken. So, if you go to [login to view URL] the first photo of the bunch is three women sitting at a table. If you click on this photo you’ll see a bigger preview. This photo was taken on July 8, 2008. When jhead lists the info, it shows the date as 2008:07:08 13:03:00. The 13:03:00 is the time it was taken. So, we’re thinking of calling the file 2008-07-08-13-03-00.jpg. This photo would then be put into a directory called: 2008-07. So, all photos taken July 2008 would be in this directory. All this, including creating the thumbnails and putting them into their own directory, would be done automatically and then be put into the database. Someone else is taking care of this part. So, when searching for this photo by date ([login to view URL]), we would like it so that you could search by day, but if you’re not sure of the day, then you leave the day field empty or something and it only searches the month and year. I guess they should be able to do that with the year as well, so if they want to search by year only, they leave month and day empty and they search by year. Now for this, is it better for the year / month / day to be in separate fields in the database, or can the date go in as 2008-07-08. Or do we even need a date field since the first part of the file name is the date? Now the other thing is keyword search. How this works will effect how the pictures get tagged in Lightroom. Is it better to have multiword tags underscored? So, for example, on this page: [login to view URL] with the three women, if someone types in Terry, they will get photos with Terry Collins in them. But if someone types in Terry Collins, will they get photos of another person whose name also begins with Terry? If the name was tagged Terry_Collins, then we could instruct the user to use underscores instead of spaces which would eliminate the unnecessary other Terry’s that would come up, which I think is preferable. When you click on Download high-resolution version, we don’t want the image to show up in the browser, but to bring up a download dialogue box. This is the first rendition of the Photo DB. It will likely evolve over time as it gets used. People may want additional search criteria, but for now, this is all we are looking at. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to access the database, but I can send you screen shots of how it looks in phpmyadmin and if you need anything changed, I can change it. Thanks! peter