Cross-Platform Network-Oriented Photo Organizer?
 

I know it's a bit of a buzzword bingo, but I'm looking for a cross-platform (Win and Linux) photo organizer/tagger that supports concurrent access from multiple users. Something to help keep a library in check stored on a SMB network drive or similar.

I mention the specific use case I have in mind here, but that's not particularly important to the concept.

How about Picasa? Would that apply?

Picasa stores information regarding tags and other metadata locally on the computer. In Windows, it's hidden somewhere in "Application Data", on Linux, somewhere in ~/.picasa2, IIRC. While it could access the share, the metadata would not be portable. (And even if it were portable, I doubt it would handle concurrency well).

There must be a solution -- professional photo studios surely use something like this. On the other hand, it's probably a commercial (e.g., expensive) product.

With code, usually things like cvs, git, svn and a handful of similar systems can handle concurrency just fine. Which makes developing in a collaborative environment much easier. You can as well use branches and many more things that I can easily imagine could be useful as well when editing images collaboratively.

They can work with any type of file, however, they are not specially suited for images, and I don't know how a similar system could make some use of the metadata in the images. But maybe this could be used in conjunction with some other tool or whatever to construct a viable solution.

I will try to search something along these lines. Dunno if I will find something though. If I find something useful I will post back here.

If I don't find anything, I'm considering starting a project to develop something like this. My initial thoughts are a python-based app with an sqlite backend. Sqlite would use a single file on the share as a backend and has support for transactions with concurrency, so seems like it should work.

In any case, I'm going to continue to look around and see what I can find, at least as a starting ground.