Now that I have my working photo reference library, I went back and looked at Adobe Bridge, Picasa 3 & Cumulus - with an eye towards why I do not like those programs one bit.

In thinking about it, what I do not like is that they are designed for way too many purposes. They have way too many features, the main working screen has too many windows, and it has to run in its own application window. Sure, they support things like image metadata, printing, integrating and syncing with proprietary photo sharing websites. They will search your whole computer for pictures. Picasa will even attempt to recognize faces.

However, I have never been able to use these programs for actually working. Instead, I usually put pictures in folders if I need them and try to organize those folders by project. That never really works. I forget to store the URLs for Flickr images. Then I usually try to do a search, or browse folders with the Finder, looking at image thumbnails. To date, that has been the easiest situation for me. If I am working with images, it is always because I'm in the middle of doing something else -- if I am designing something, I usually am placing images in something else. If I am drawing, I am flipping back and forth between other pictures.

So some essential features of this photo reference library are now obvious:
1. simple screens with just a few tools - chosen by myself
2. lots of tagging - flexible & editable
3. works in web browser - which is nice for me because that integrates seamlessly with how I work - if i have the choice of opening another application, or just making a tab...i like tabs.
4. locally hosted: can still browse images folder with Finder. i can access my images when I do not have internet. I feel like artists using images in their work will also not have wireless always. The last thing you want to do when your hands are all dirty is to have to use some complicated interface to toggle back and forth between a few images.
5. very extensible and modifiable - I can resize all my thumbnails and change the layout of the pages in many different ways. I can add and remove different kinds of features. I can store searches as bookmarks. you simply can't do that with these existing software programs.
6. different ways of importing: through a folder, through a form, through rss feeds (flickr/delicious bookmarks) -- this manages downloading images from the web - anywhere on the web, not just some weird google photo sharing website. I feel like people I know who look at and use a lot of pictures are also not primarily focused on managing vacation images. The act of using Flickr already is something I have fully adopted. I like sharing images in Flickr much better than these other websites. I feel like there are more activities and communities around the content of the photos than might happen on a site like photobucket. I feel like photobucket is more about sharing pictures of friends, pictures from weddings, parties and vacations.
7. benefiting from drupal's flexibility to change the visual design. Ex. Adobe Bridge has a very dark screen. I like light screens with my images. But I can always change my mind and redo the colors if I want to.

These features allow me to sort and organize my photos in a way that works with my own workflow. Admittedly, knowing Drupal well makes me feel more confident to say that changing the way this works is super easy. Were I to share this with friends, they would need a local webserver, I would have to share or teach them how to change settings.