Develop photo browser with keyword search function

We produce a photo library called Photosymbols®. The pictures are used to communicate ideas and make information easier for people with a learning disability. They are more like clip art than stock, and are generally used at small thumbnail sizes alongside paragraphs of text.

We currently sell the pictures as a complete collection on disc, which uses a simple HTML browser to navigate through galleries. There is no search feature, which makes it difficult to find specific images.

Our new version will be released early in 2009. We want to completely redesign the browser to include a keyword search feature, and are seeking tenders from programmers.

We are open to suggestions as to how you would implement the browser. For example, whether it would work better as a dedicated application, or work within the user%u2019s web browser, flash etc, bearing in mind the following criteria:

- The solution must work for PC and Mac users.
- The solution must be compatible with the JawBone screen reader and meet other accessibility standards.

We are distributing the photo library on USB pen drives, from which the browser will also need to run. Access to the pictures must not be dependent on having an internet connection.

Ideally, we would like our users to be able to launch the browser, which might start with a welcome screen or default view of all the pictures. Then when they perform a search, the browser will reduce the view to only images with those keywords.

It would be nice if it could also suggest similar keywords to extend or refine the search. It would be double nice if we could build in some additional menus for help content.

Once people find a picture they want to use, then they should be able to copy and paste or drag and drop it into their document. DTP users might also benefit from a way of selecting a number of pictures and then exporting them, but as long as it is easy to use, the method can be worked out after further discussion.

We organise and keyword the picture collection within Adobe Lightroom (produces an XML database).

There are 3000 pictures in total, each available as lo-res (300 pixels) and hi-res (1200 pixels). Users will need a way to choose between the different resolution versions.

Please get in touch if you think you can help us out with this, and we can discuss in more detail.