I attended Drupalcon Paris, and got a bit more familiar with Drupal 7. One of the sessions I attended was Nate Haug's presentation about the major changes to the Image module, which will be included in Drupal core. Basically, it does everything I need it to do for the photo reference library, which is awesome. I would start building my library in Drupal 7 today if only views were a bit further along. It also seemed like the stream wrappers in Drupal 7 might be helpful for bringing in files from flickr or feeds. The issue of how to sync photos up between a localhost + web installation is still a crazy mess.

The good news is that the few artist friends who I've shown my library to said 'I would test that' or 'I need that' -- so that's good news. Though I realized that I also need to add a print button.

I'm still interested in using Features or something to make the drupal settings sharable - though honestly I'm a bit scared because while the Development Seed products are really awesome and beautiful - even usable - to actually work with the code and do anything that isn't documented is kind of frightening. I still feel it is miraculous that I figured out how to use the context module. Others are not so lucky. But on the other hand, there is some work in Drupal 7 with exporting settings and stuff like that, so I think it might be worthwhile to worry about that stuff in Drupal 7.

Time is kind of an issue. Personally, I would actually really like to build this in Drupal 7 as a product/platform. I have nothing better to do (in this area) and it would be a good way to find bugs in Drupal 7 and contributed modules. If Drupal 7 is done by the Spring 10, and important contributed modules by Summer 10...then I really have 9 months to make this in Drupal 7.

So what I will probably do this winter is to keep using my Drupal 6 photo library, then work on the design for the interface (get it perfect the way I want it) in something that I can theme for Drupal 7. I will probably get the image scraping working + also the multiimage layout working the way I want it...even though that will automatically work in Drupal 7. So my big concern will be upgrading the images.

I will not worry about syncing versions until later, or even packaging this as something that is sharable. I will do that next spring.