> I
> didn't see anything in this system where there was a way to keep certain
> kinds of information in a standard machine readable format.  Once you've got
> 1000s of pictures, the hard part is finding the few you want for a
> particular purpose.  I didn't see any mention of searching by geographic
> coordinate, political geographic location, time, people appearing in the
> picture, etc.

This is generally called metadata management, and is a feature of lots 
of image management apps - try Adobe's Photoshop Album for example.  I 
haven't used it, but was around at Adobe when it was being developed, 
and it looked slick.

(It might be too mousy for you, though!)

I think one reason these kinds of photo management apps are indeed a 
rite of passage for web programmers (and that Gallery is so bloated) is 
that everybody who cares enough to want to enter metadata about his 
pictures has strong opinions about how it should work, and a slightly 
different feature list than everyone else.  So your own custom solution 
will always be best, if most costly.
-- 
Timothy J. Weber
http://timothyweber.org
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