After @Silnan posted a request for a meme dump, I realised it would be great to set up something that can handle media collection to work alongside Research category related discussions.
I think a booru would be the best choice for the tool.
Traditionally, a booru is used for this purpose by meme communities that don’t operate primarily on social media platforms. More often, it’s used by fandoms of all kinds (usually anime) to pool fan art. See The Booru Project - the home of imageboards for a list of some boorus.
Unfortunately, booru.org is not a good choice because they’ve locked up uploading by requiring a Captcha every single post no matter what, because the site has been struggling to deal with spam and there’s not enough people working on it. It’s not a good choice for us since we can’t extend the functionality for our own purposes.
I have some booru usage experience, and I do also think they could be very useful for massive archival/organizing purposes. The tagging system seems so practical to me, and they allow for some small discussions too, as well as (hopefully) serving as storage too, to be cited in the forums or other TPM/MSO sites, for more elaborate discussions or dissections.
The gallery view is also very practical when you’re looking for a particular type of meme but you only remember some aspects of it.
There’s also the parent/child sort of threading of the posts that could allow for when there’s some slight variations of the same uh “thing”, e.g. different quality variations of an image, or different crops, but not “enough” to be an entirely different meme. This can happen plenty in the “meme world”, where a single immediate source spawns various memes, so I think this specific aspect of how (at least some) boorus work could be very useful. This could also work to connect entirely separate memes, too, in some way.
I don’t have any experience with specific softwares nor running any, though.
A tagged database, it seems to me, is pretty much the best way to organise and archive visual material. I think my position on it is similar to people who use Evergreen Note-taking and go on and on about how a directory is just fundamentally a bad data structure / organisation format for notes.
From memory I think Shimmie and Danbooru both implement image pooling and, as @darlene mentioned, parent-child relations (which are both great for things that are in some way connected to eachother, but without enough relevance or notability to constitute an entirely new tag). Many boorus also have an internal wiki, to collate tag information and best practices. It would be interesting to consider how we could integrate such a thing with the forum.
Pooling would be perfect for organising overlapping sets of images into multiple collections. It would also be able to handle things like "memes popular on Facebook during 2022" much better than tags.