code iterat.ive.ly

According to my USPTO trademark application, Photocore is “Computer software for organizing, archiving, viewing and distributing images and photographs over a network”. I think that pretty much sums it up.

Photocore will be available for limited licensing at the beginning of 2007.

Right now I have two showcase sites, both with very similar layouts at the moment.

• theGooley.com – my personal photo website
• USPresswire.com (login required) – a wire agency using Photocore to ingest, broadcast and distribute images to clients

If you’re serious about wanting to see how Photocore looks with >100 photographers, >100k images and >2.5M bits of metadata, send me an email and I can give you a demo login to the site.

Now, a little history after the jump…

I started writing image web archiving systems several years ago when I determined that nothing on the market came close to meeting my needs (and yes, I tried Gallery). The first iteration of my software was called Lightbox and was developed over a long weekend while I was a student at Georgia Tech. My goal was to design a system to manage the digital image archive that was begining to rapidly grow at Georgia Tech Student Publications – see, digital cameras had just started becoming affordable so the entire photo staff was rapidly converting from film to digital. At that phase in the game, there simply wasn’t any software out there to manage multiple photographers and multiple downloaders.

After releasing Lightbox and starting to use it hosted out of my dorm room, I took feedback and augmented the system very heavily leading to Lightbox v2. Lightbox v2 was still in use by student pubs at Georgia Tech until only a couple months ago when it was replaced by another student-developed application: Mofoto.

During that time, I did a ground-up rewrite of the Lightbox Archive Server as I was then calling it, and released Lightbox v3. Lightbox v3 ran my personal website and that of several other photographers for a long time. Lightbox v3 was also used by US PRESSWIRE as their live image archive and distribution system begining in March 2006.

After having written two complete from-the-ground-up image archive systems (Lightbox and Lightbox v3) and using v3 in a production, high-load environment I learned a bunch of important things which prompted me to again drop the codebase completely and start over.

And thus, Photocore was born.

Photocore was designed to rock the house where Lightbox v3 had faltered. It was built using pretty much every tool in the C#.NET 2.0 toolbox. And it was designed to be customizable in every way possible so that many clients can use Photocore without a visual clue that they are the same engine, and so that agencies with existing websites can easily integrate Photocore into the same look-and-feel.

Photocore is in active development to include more features that will appeal to the individual photographer. But it truly is a system built for the large wire agency or stock agency.

I will be including more pieces here about Photocore features and development so stay tuned.