Image management - customizing the ImagesManager module

[alp9000]

I'm working on a music magazine website, and hoping to build it in PW.  I'm a PHP programmer, but this would be my first PW site. So far everything's working great, but I'm confused about image management.  The client has made it clear that re-using images and easily finding those images in the admin is a priority, as there will be photographers uploading (and tagging) images, which can then be used and re-used by writers in articles.  So there needs to be a consistent system. 

Soma's Images Manager Module does a lot of what I need, but there's one important difference: rather than creating categories within the manager, I would like to use my existing Pages to organize images.  Let's say I already have these pages (children of Home):

Artist

-Decembrists

-M. Ward

-Shins

Author/Photographer

- Joe Photo

- Jane Writer

- Ed Editor

Venue

- Crystal Ballroom

- Aladdin Theater

What I'd like to do is tag each image (or maybe batch of images) with artist(s), author(s), venue(s), etc.  This means that instead of creating categories in the Images Manager, it would access a hierarchy like this to locate images according to any of their "tags":

Images

-Artist

--Decembrists

-Venue

--Crystal Ballroom

It's the same idea as with categories, except that the hierarchy would be autopopulated from other pages, and images could live in more than one place in the tree.  

The question is, is this practical?  Does it seem wise for me to try to customize Images Manager for this purpose?  What problems might I expect?

Thanks!

[ryan]

I'm not sure about it from the ImagesManager side, as I don't have as much experience with that module. But what you are suggesting seems fine. Generally you can take the pages concept to apply towards management of any kind of data, including files/images, and it tends to work pretty well. With regard to "tags", that implies using the existing tags built-in to files/images or using text fields. You may find it more worthwhile in this case to use page references for your artists, authors, venues, etc. while associating each image with a page, and select the related artists, authors, venues with each one of them.