Developing modules for a photo agency

Hi!
I am (slowly) developing a site for a small independent photo agency *). I feel that a lot of the functionality that I need is already in Drupal core and contrib, but there are certain points that I need to address, probably through developing a few new modules. (Theming is obviously an important part of it too, but that's another story.)

I have a few ideas on how to implement the functionality that I need and some choices to make, so I'm hoping for some comments and wisdom from the community. Also, if someone else is already doing or has done anything like this, that would be good to know. Hopefully this could turn into a solution that other picture agencies can use, or even better, a set of general modules that can be used in many different contexts.

In short, I need too look at 1) the handling of large image files and the quality of resized images, 2) a specific image search function and 3) ecommerce integration.

Below are my thoughts so far – sorry for the long post. Please look at the parts that interest you and state your opinion! Thanks!

/zoo33

*) A photo agency is a company that works with different photographers and maintains a large archive of images that it sells to different types of media: newspapers, magazines, web sites, books etc.

1. Image handling

Problems:
– High resolution images are impractical to upload via html forms.
– Picture agencies need good quality in their downscaled images, especially with the "composition images" that people download for free to try the images out before they buy.
– There is often usable information stored in the images' metadata that should be picked up automatically and stored in the database.

Solution: hiresimage.module / bigimage.module / photograph.module

This module should provide an interface for creating regular image nodes from high resolution image files. The idea is that this module will act as an extension to image.module through nodeapi. The high resolution image is scaled down to a resolution that the admin can choose and with fine grained quality settings including sharpening and color profile conversion (using Imagemagick).

The resulting file is what I'll use for the "comp image" and that is also used as image.module's "original" file (which is then scaled down to thumbnails etc. depending of what you specify in image.module's settings). This way we can assign specific logic to the high resolution image while still maintaining all of image.module's functionality (galleries, integration with other modules etc.).

The hi-res images can either be uploaded to a certain directory on the server or through an html form. The module should also be able to read metadata from the image file and put that in the node info. (This is basically a rip-off of audio.module's functionality.)

Possible problem: Will it be possible for this module to call the appropriate functions in image.module to create the image nodes? Or will it have to duplicate image.module's functionality for saving to the database?
Would it be easier to just fork image.module and have it emulate all of image.module's behaviour?

2. A great image search function

It is super important that images can easily be found by the clients. We need a search function where only image nodes show up in the results. They should be rendered as a thumbnail gallery, not the bulit-in Drupal way with a teaser list. We need the ability to filter depending of image orientation and similar. Maybe provide the possibility to do sub searches, that is, search within an already existing search result (which is basically the same thing as searching for two keywords).

Solution: image_search.module
Well, I suppose this is fairly easy to achieve through the search api functions or even custom sql queries.
This module could provide it's own gallery presentation for result pages or perhaps use the gallery bundled with image.module somehow. Or maybe it's just a matter of theming the standard search result pages?

3. Ecommerce integration.

In this case we won't actually be selling file downloads, not primarily anyway. The clients (or some of them) will be allowed to download high-res images without paying online, but instead they'll get billed afterwards. The pricing depends of how they used the image (print/web, circulation, size, cover etc.).
We might also consider the possibility to pay online for individual image downloads, possibly using a royalty free business model in that case.
The images all follow the same price list, so there is no use assigning prices to individual images.

Solution 1: hires_image_product.module
Develop a solution for letting my image nodes act as ecommerce file products. Perhaps by using ec_media.module? I'd like for the images to become products automatically as all hires images in my case are products.

Solution 2: A new payment method for billing? Or could I use COD?

Solution 3: The variable price should be possible to work out with existing Ecommerce functionality i think. However, it would be kind of a detour to assign prices to individual images and then vary that price depending on different variables (which I think is what the usual approach is).
A better solution would be if my product type didn't have a price tag at all but rather was able to fetch it from a price list depending on some user input. (Flexicharge is supposed to handle shipping charges only, right?)

Solution 1B: Maybe my case is so different from a regular ecommerce site that it would be easier do develop this part from scratch? There is a lot of functionality in ecommerce that I don't need.

Again, thanks for reading! /zoo33