In the process of developing a model to deal with the vast quantity of digital photos from myself, family members, digital cameras, camera phones, compact flashes that were once in a camera but now lay around in a drawer, etc... I'm assembling a list of tools and scratch notes. This is a work in progress...

Goals:
+ file warehouse mirrored at the OS level
+ backup to another external drive (offsite eventually)
+ use tools provided by the platform/repo (No compiling).
+ centralize the file warehouse (no home directories)
+ logical directory structure
+ possibly some type of overlay application to allow indexing, tagging, searching, etc...

Concerns:
+ Need to deal with incorrect or absent metadata:
- cameras that didn't require the date/time to be set

Results:
+ Base platform is Fedora 10 & 11.
+ Mirroring data is solved with the integrate RAID tools (mdadm) in Linux
- I might explore using LVM base mirroring instead
+ GUI tool to download files from cameras/storage: rapid-photo-downloader
- this tool also has backup choices, bares investigation
+ Command line tool: perl-Image-ExifTool

Links:
http://linux.com/archive/feature/147564