Digital image library solution?

Our art department wants to scan about 1500 35mm slides.  We’ll be scanning at fairly high resolution, so each file will be around 5MB.  We are looking for a digital image library - web-based - which will let us upload and categorize our pictures. We would like something like Flickr or Picassa.

We’d like casual user management (single login for the whole school, and a teacher login to edit / change upload slides). Availability is important, as is optimization. We would like to be able to download original file size (like Xanga)  or a derivative thereof.

We’re a school, so inexpensive == good.  As this collection of 35mm slides represents the heart of our art department, we are interested in data integrity, and long-term storage.

Please contact me here with any suggestions.

Thank you!

On 23 January 2007, Tom Hoffman inscribed the following thoughts about this post:

You should at least consider DSpace.  It is an open source web archiving system used in university libraries.  It may be too heavy for what you want, but it definitely should be good for the data integrity and long-term storage considerations, which aren’t trivial.

On 23 January 2007, Ewan McIntosh inscribed the following thoughts about this post:

Flickr would offer good integrity, flexibility, easy types of access and the possibility of creating backup from online collections to hard disk. It’s cheap, too. The self-organising element of the tagging there together with the ability to manipulate images (add notes, for example, or republish elsewhere) seems attractive.