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I'm at the Drupal and Multimedia session at DrupalCamp NYC 5 and they were briefly going over the modules that there are (a) there are a lot and (b) there's usually several ways to do something. One thing they pointed out was that by Drupal 7, the plan is for image module and imagefield module to merge. Great, this will cut down on redundancy and it will give site-builders a clear solution that will hopefully do everything they need it to do.
I also think that MAQUM should be migrated to imagefield and a lot of the metadata should be shoved into a CCK field.
In the beginning (2002), there was Image, and everyone could create images as nodes and all was good, if a bit simplistic. (There was even IPTC and EXIF metadata support). After a little bit of time, you could even attach images to nodes. By 2006, images could be attached to nodes. (By now, Flexinode had been around for a while and CCK had been around for a bit, too.) CCK became the predominant way of creating content types, as opposed to writing a new module for each individual content type. ImageField, a CCK add-on, (released in July 2006) allowed images to be handled by CCK. This, combined with other CCK fields let you do all sorts of neat things like set up an online store with one field being the name of the object your are selling, another field being the description and another three or four fields for uploading images of the product. Or you could be an online newspaper and have anywhere from zero to several images per article. Each page (whether online store or newspaper) could be themed to layout the information appropriately with ImageCache creating derivative (read: resized and/or cropped) images.
Fast forward to 2008 and there's primarily two ways to get images in your Drupal site, with Lullabot's Image vs. ImageField and ImageCache being the definitive comparison between the two. If you were fine with images as nodes and had simple needs (gallery, photoblog, etc.) you probably went with (or continued using from back in 2002) Image. On the other hand, if you were creating tons of content types thanks to CCK, you probably jumped ship to ImageField.
Now, there's talk about merging Image with ImageField (and ImageCache), with a script to migrate from Image to ImageField. But it was also pointed out that one field to handle all uploaded files, images or not, should be the way to go and that this would be the end of ImageField. FileField, combined with FileField Image would handle everyone's imge handling needs (as well as other file types as well).
While some people think images need special handling (and they are right to a degree and FileField Image takes care of this) there is also the consideration that other file types need special handling, such as videos. Just like images have a need for derivative images, so do videos (original high resolution, low resolution, stored as a flash file and a thumbnail screencap to display in the page). Having one unified way of uploading files would mean less code to maintain and there might even be a reasonable chance of getting file (and potentially image) handling in core, the CCK way.
(For these reasons, I've decided to postpone a D6 release of MAQUM.)
So I'm tired of having to come up with a name for all the photos I load, so there will be a lot of Untitled ones going up. Complete descriptions, tags and other metadata will persist. MAQUM is coming along nicely.
I've posted an RFC regarding the use of DAM applications and how Drupal can take advantage of them, basically, my wetdream for online image galleries. I've been toying with Aperture for a week and love it, it offers several things Lightroom doesn't, however both feel sluggish on my not too slow MacBook. Not sure which application I want to use yet, but it doesn't matter since MAQUM would work off EXIF and IPTC.