I would like to make a disk that I can use on my courses and after dives with clients. It would be a photo gallery of sorts but I want to be able to have them search for their creature by name, too. I want to have a little blurb about the creature with the photo.
So they could click on "Turtles" and go through all the shots, or type in "Green turtle" and see only those, or type in the scientific name and see those...does that make sense?
Is there a relatively painless way to do this? Software out there?
I don't think there are any off the shelf solutions out there for what you want to do, you're going to need a custom built application. I have a lot of experience with developing database applications and am willing to help you out because I really enjoy doing this sort of stuff. Let's discuss it more fully during the surface interval next time we're out diving together.
Extensis Portfolio would probably do what you want. An email to the company would confirm this. There's a browser that's sold with the program that you can use to distribute a catalog of images and I think it gives you the ability to search the IPTC data. So you could just write captions in the caption field of photoshop and you'd be able to search any words you used. It's a great program for cataloging images also. I've seen it used with over 100,000 assets before.
