RFC: Metadata Aware Quick Uploader Module - Developer Wanted

Current Image Gallery Metadata Landscape

Many people are using applications such as iPhoto and Picasa to manage their photos. Professionals and serious hobbyists and delving into the new applications, Aperture and Lightroom. These applications are what many consider DAM or digital asset management applications. These applications are all geared to handle two tasks: image adjustments (white balance, cropping, grayscale conversions, basic clone and stemp tools, etc) and metadata handling. I'd like to see Drupal work hand in hand with these applications.

With regard to the second task of metadata, photos often have tons of metadata embedded (either in the JPEG or the RAW file formats) such as date, time, shutter speed, focal length, flash, exposure compensation, ISO, camera model, etc. The above DAM applications also allow shutterbugs to easily fill in relevant IPTC fields such as title (which would map to node title), keywords (taxonomy using tags), caption (node body), etc. Combined, there is a wealth of relevant information embedded in the photos. Many photographers like to see the more technical information when browsing online galleries (indeed, Gallery already has support for such features). More casual users would like to easily browse their images by tag (which is mapped from the IPTC keywords field).

Currently, there are plugins written for Aperture and iPhoto to allow exporting to flickr. Lightroom export module creates webpages that can be uploaded, but currently interface with any online CMS. Rather than create plugins for each of the above DAM applications to interface to Drupal via XMLRPC, I would like to see a mass import module that has the following features.

Metadata Aware Quick Uploader Module

MAQUM would simply allow a user (with the correct permissions) to upload an image and from that image's metadata, would automagically fill in the right metadata, stored in taxonomy. (The image would be exported from the DAM software to any place temporarily on the user's harddrive.) Significantly, the date and time would be filled in for the creation of the node. The title of the node would come from IPTC's title field. The node body, which would describe the photo in a bit of detail would come from IPTC's caption field. Further, the images could be tagged in the DAM with terms such as sunset, beach, children, water, ocean, etc and these terms would automagically be populated into a specified vocabulary.

Going further, shutter speed could be its own vocabulary and using something nifty like the views module would allow you to say show me all photos taken with an exposure of over 5 minutes. Focal length, flash, exposure compensation, etc would all be their own vocabularies. Special styling of the display of image nodes and their associated metadata (which would now be found in Drupal's wonderfully powerful taxonomy) would complete the picture.

An added bonus would be allowing a user to upload mutiple files somehow (either a "hot directory" to watch for or maybe as simple as a tarball or zip of images).

Money Where My Mouth Is

I am not a programmer. I can futz with Drupal, but I am most certainly not a programmer. I'll pony up $150 towards this. Maybe more. I'd like to stay within the community, if at all possible. Anyone else see the use in such a module? (Some stuff might be able to be cribbed from EXIF module and ajaxgallery, in which case, I'd forward some funds to the respective developers.)

Would anyone else like to see something like this and pitch in? Does anyone else have any ideas they'd like to put forth?