[lug] photo sharing, socializing...

[William D. Knoche]

Just looking for some suggestions...

I was asked by some friends from college about a setting up restricted 
photo sharing and social networking site.
We want to be able for anyone from the group to upload and archive into 
"galleries" photos of ours, be able to annotate, tag and search by date, 
location, people tagged, etc. as well as have "conversations" about them.
We would like it to be secure for the invited registered members and 
perhaps being able to selectively choose to make some things very 
private (to a limited subset) or more open.

I have been looking for the components to host this myself.
Certainly there are some choices for "forums", blogging, etc. What is best?
What about the photo sharing part? How to integrate the discussions and 
images...?

I can certainly just get a subscription to Smugmug or another photo 
sharing site though I have no personal experience setting that up for a 
small group.
(If you have opinions/comments/recommendations on a particularly good 
site I would welcome that, too)

But if I were to roll my own...
Has anyone done anything like this? Suggestions/recommendations?
The goal is really more about maintaining control and not being locked 
in to a proprietary service/product rather than being free... my time is 
actually a limiting factor here and worth something if only to me.

It would be nice to try this out on my own server but be able to migrate 
to a hosted service as needed (some aspect of scaling it up). So some 
preference for things that are or could be made to run in a cloud or 
hosted service.

--bill