I really like Flickr and so does anybody else. Using tags to categorize photos just feels right. The strage thing about this is, there are no open source clones. With the rise of del.icio.us we got a few reimplementations like Scuttle and de.liro.us' Rubric. But a webbased image gallery tool using tags? I couldn't find nothing except one written in Java and I don't really want a Tomcat running on my little machine here.

If I had some more time I would write my own, but I just don't have the time. Perhaps I didn't look good enough? Does a software exist which matches the following criteria:

• Free and Open Source Software
• Tag based categorisation
• Creating of Imagesets (“Albums”)
• Comment and possibly rating functions
• AJAX based inplace editing
• EXIF/IPTC reading (and writing see below)
• PHP would be great, Perl or Ruby would possibly fit in as well
• MySQL storage if needed

And what I'd really love to see is syncing data between EXIF/IPTC and the info entered through the webinterface. This way I could use a software like Adobe Elements to organize my images at home, then sync them to the Server which automatically uses the IPTC data to fill the Database (for search). When I later browse the pictures online and update any data this is written to the DB and to the IPTC fields in the image. When I later sync the images back or copy them somewhere else the Metadata is always inside the image.

Oh and before anyone asks why not just use flickr: Sometimes you just want to have control over your images without being dependant on some company.