I have the photo archives of a theatre company I was involved with for 12 years. It is coming upon its 50th anniversary. I have a high speed automatic scanner, so I am going to generate scans of many of the photos -- that part is not too hard. Even easier for modern groups in the digital age, where the photos are already digital and date-tagged.

But now I want members of the group to be able to rotate the photos, tag them with the names of people in them and other tags, group them into folders where needed, and add comments. I can't do this on my own, it is a collaborative project.

Lots of photo sharing sites let other people add comments. Few sites let you add tags or let trusted other people do things like rotations. Flickr lets others draw annotations and add tags/people which would make it a likely choice, but they can't rotate.

Facebook has an interesting set of features. It's easy to tag photos with friends' names, and they get notified of it and the photos appear on their page, which is both good and bad. (The need for the owner to approve is a burden here.) Tagging non-friends is annoying because when somebody adds a real friend tag you must delete the old one, and the old ones may be spelled differently. However, the real deal-breaker on facebook is that the resolution is unacceptably small.

The recent killer feature I really want is face recognition, which makes tagging with people's names vastly easier. Even the fact that it auto-draws boxes around the faces for you to tag is a win even without the recognition feature. The algorithms are far from perfect but they speed up the task a great deal. As such, right now an obvious choice is Picasa and Picasa Web Albums. however, while PWA lets you allow others to upload photos to your albums and tag their own photos, they can't tag yours.

There is also face recognition in iPhoto, but I am not a Mac user so I don't know if that can meet this need.

So right now two choices seem to be Flickr (but I must do all rotates) or a newly created Picasa account to which the password is shared. That's a bit of a kludge but it seems to be the only way to get shared face recognition tagging.

Facebook can be integrated with a face recognizer called "Polar Rose" which also works with the 23hq photo sharing site. However, Facebook's resolution is way, way too small and you need to approve tags.

I have not tried all the photo sharing sites so I wonder if people know of one that can do what I want?