art morgue, drupal style

I need a good way to organize the reference images I use for drawing. Usually this is called an 'art morgue' - and if you take art classes they always make you cut up pictures from a magazine. I am going to design one for myself, but in Drupal.

My best tool is the internet, and not my non-existent supply of magazines. I take zillions of pictures on my cell phone and sometimes from my camera - nearly all of which go into Flickr, and usually I tag all my photos there. I am not an obsessive tagger or photograph organizer. I switch computers sometimes, might want to project images, and also might need to make lists of pictures i want to color print (the next time I hook up my printer. And most importantly, I need a few lightbox displays for making images fullscreen -- and sometimes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 8 images would be ideal.

Since I am adept with Drupal, it seems like it would be super easy to make myself a drupal site that is especially suited for organizing photos especially for drawing. Ideally, the set of features (the recipe) could get integrated with something like open atrium. I am trying to centralize my note-taking, scheduling...and what would eventually be photo-tagging into one place. And maybe, maybe, it would be possible to use "features" to share the drupal settings so you can have one too.

Recipe for art morgue in drupal

• Image: can come from upload, flickr import (with metadata), scraped off internet given a url. Image should have title, image, related urls (bookmarks), and tagging.
• fancy image searching would be helpful (size mainly), and scraping as much information from the image (but showing it kind of hidden)
• tags: there should be tags for what an image or project is called, and then other tags as necessary. project tags should be favoritable, and there should be a date history for when things were tagged what. also, if the tag came from flickr or not.
• the way that projects are tagged might need to be a separate vocabulary from the general tags for an image
• lightbox: make some views of tags and give options for different layouts of images (works with different imagecache sizes - force stretching pictures to be bigger as necessary)
• searching: this should be crazily easy. i should be able to go to a webpage, put in my work, click a layout button...and that's it. it would be great too, if it remembered which page i viewed so i can jump back there again. (use case: i might look at the same project for a few nights)
• photo notes: it would be nice to have the flickr note maker on images BUT it has to be able to be turned off because that little box is so unslightly.
• local syncing - this has to work locally (with no internet) - and then also it needs to have a place on the web so that i can always get to it from anywhere
• public/private - some pictures might need to be shared, but within the same tag grouping. all default to private.
• white, gray or black themes switching.
• some classification about printing: such as 'i printed this, i should print this, i should print this on good photo paper'

The Art Part

There are different ways you can use images in drawing. For the last two years I have taken a lot of botanical illustration classes. We are encouraged to not cheat and draw from photos. It really is true that if you draw mainly from photographs you mess up the foreshortening. However, if you practice enough drawings from life, you eventually can use many images to help reconstruct an original plant (or bone, or fossil.) This process of reconstruction is actually very fun. It's great when you don't have anything particularly beautiful in your house, but you want to draw something fun and different. (I say it is fun, but it is also hard and takes a lot of practice.)
I always sucked at collecting images. I'm just not the kind of person who can organize papers into folders. It makes me so sad, but meanwhile, I'm very organized digitally. Millions of tools exist for digital photo organization. My teachers at my illustration school are much more organized than I am. Some of them have special 3 ring binders with plastic sheets. It's true that it's so much easier to work on an illustration project with photo printouts. You can take pictures of plants (or whatever) and then put them in a photo editing program and alter the constrast a lot so you can see some of the shaping and shading a little better. It's good if you are learning. But inevitably, I have boxes of abandoned papers and they are just taking up space. Meanwhile, I have so many digital pictures, and I am super cheap about color printing ink - so if I can just display the image on my computer while drawing it, that would be more convenient. Also, I have so many pictures that it feels wasteful to print them out.
If I am drawing the last thing I want to be doing it messing with settings on my computer. The computer just plain sucks for art if you just want to look at images while you draw. There are plenty of people in painting studios who are miraculously able to take a tiny scrap of a photo and stick it next to their giant painting. I just don't work like that. I have to be looking at many pictures, or going back and forth between different ones.
Adobe Bridge is totally stupid for this too, btw. The reason why it is not great (for me) is that I want my images from Flickr, from google images, from my phone, from wherever. It's really that point in time when I am on the internet and googling for 'turtles' that I want to make a collection of turtles, turtle eyes, turtle legs. So basically, I get some itchy desire to draw something from an idea, and I need to group the pictures into categories. So then, when I am all excited about drawing, I should just be able to find my 'cute baby turtles' collection, look at them easily, and also have all the bookmarks easily available (because of course while searching in google images, I have been reading all about baby turtles...:)
Which brings me to one other thing about the photo references - I guess that not everyone has a hangup about drawing from pictures, and pictures only. My mom and sisters do this, so does everyone else who drew as a kid. I didn't do this, but to be fair, it look me a long time to finally learn how to break down images and copy photos and convert the ideas in a photo to a line-based representation of it. I really wish I knew a little more about people's learning processes for drawing because it really does seem like there are some realizations people have to have, if they weren't born with it. So really, I wouldn't have been able to really use photos for drawing until maybe last year.
But I will say that in my very honest opinion, there definitely is a certain perspective in photos and if you copy them...it's almost like the ideas have gone through too many people and filters and something dies. Not always, but there is so much hipster art that was copied from photos ripped off the internet. It kind of makes it less interesting to me...I can use google images too. But then again, there's making art and consuming art. If you are making art, then you most definitely should go crazy with looking at lots of things.