How can i manage some 50,000 pictures locally?

realized,

Good question. Without knowing more about your business and workflow, it's hard to make an actual recommendation, but I can provide some product suggestions for you to look at. If you want more of a recommendation, tell us more about what you do with the images (processing, etc), and what you need (or would like) your management software to do.

http://www.photools.com/
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/
http://www.photodex.com/products/compupicpro
http://www.extensis.com/en/products/asset_management/
http://www.veripic.com/
http://store.acdsee.com/store/acd/en_US/DisplayProductDetailsPage/productID.78701700

Cheers,
LHerrou

I would like the pictures to be private, and stored locally only. However i would consider picasa if there was a commercial version that would let me setup users/groups and only thoes users/groups could access it.

While I would NOT recommend Picasa for your needs, I will point out that it keeps all the photos locally unless you choose to upload them to web albums. On the other hand, if you want to use it for multi-user settings, you may want to read this:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Picasa/thread?tid=115fcd4bd8e6e997&hl=en

We operate a property management company and document everything with before/after pictures.

let me give you an example. A tenant might complain about something thats broken, so we go and take pictures, then take pictures while things are being fixed, then the end result.

we have some 30,000 pictures over the last 5 years between all of our properties and other businesses we document via pictures.

none of the pictures are ever modified, post processed, or anything. what is taken from the camera is what we see.

no changes are EVER made to any pictures.

but we like to go through them and view them. so thumbnails are a must, and adding notes/tags is also a must so we can document i.e "before replacment of bla bla bla" and so on

ACDSee Pro would probably be a decent option, and it will run if the databases is set up on a server, and the client software on individual computers. However, it has no concurrency protection at all - which means that if two people work on the database and both save at the same time, there is a risk of overwriting information. This thread in their support forum may provide some greater insight: http://community.acdsee.com/forums/topic/acd-pro-shared-on-network

Otherwise, if that is critical for you, you need to look at designated client - server software. It will be a good bit more expensive. Take a look at the products from Veripic and Extensis.

That might not be an issue in our office, i will look into it. Thank you for your sugestion.

Ok I'm not sure if this would help but why not store the links to your photos in a SQL express database rather than storing the photographs in the database itself. It's free and the max number of records far excedes your posted need.
It would work something like this
Store the discription and other information about the photo (including the url) the url could be read and loaded as needed.

after a few emails back and forth with them,  i dont think acdsee will work.

i am howevery very impressed with the two other options, Extensis and Veripic, though the $4000-$7000 range is a bit much.

Originally i was thinking i could do this for $500, that appears impossible.. So i am raising my budget to $2000.

Any other ideas?

Not that I am personally familiar with. Here are a couple of others worth a look, however:

DBGallery
http://grrsystems.com/DBGallery/CapabilitiesOverview.htm

PhotoOrganizer
http://po.shaftnet.org/

Beyond those, you may be able to get a programmer to do a custom solution for you per Excalibur_Software's suggestion, etc.

do you realise you have changed the problem.... I woudl advise raising another question asking for a solution with your budget about managing images .....   it may attract difernet experts that have know about this....  $2000 sound a hell of a lot....
epsecially as you could use an online stoage such as www.box.net for alot less and get an online solution.

looking at your original question:(pleae re-read)
why not use :
http://www.photolocator.com/

@ chilternPC:

Have you ever tried to work with more than some hundreds of images? Thousands of images, at any size, would quickly become unwieldy with any online solution because of file-uploads alone, even if the software was up to the task.

no pain no gain...
only initally would the problem be there and that's of the mass upload....a day maybe or 2 at the most..
once the majority of files were uploaded it would then be a trickle every day...
its like getting a store "online" the first step is the biggest (almost feel like singing)  once the entire stocvk is put online (the biggest step) then putting new stuff is as easy as saving t the local drive..

the future will be in access from the 'net  (in the clouds...)
if you spend out for a local solution how will access this from the office ? from home ? what about other staff?