André:
Thanks for your response and your work on Coppermine.
I don't think that your Group Picture plugin applies to my issue. I'm not interested in accumulating thumbnails of one particular subject in one place, and my photo collection is purely historical documentation of a far-off, poorly-documented place.
Consider Coppermine's "full view" of a specific photo, one that shows the full information: filename, album name filesize, date added, dimensions, number of times viewed, etc, along with a medium-size view of the photo. I'd like to be able to add a link on that page to another related photo, direclty to its "full view" page.
Maybe an example would make this more clear:
I have a ~1930 photo of some people sitting outside the closed front door of a house. If I am very lucky I will find another contemporary photo of the interior of the same house, maybe even the other side of the same door. These are two photos of different subjects, but clearly related. I'd like to place a link in the "full view" for the exterior view photo saying something like, "To see what is probably the interior of this house, click <here>. " On the "full view" of the interior photo, I'd like to place this: "To see what is probably the exterior of this house, click <here>.
These texts might be placed in a new field, perhaps called "Related Items". Or, it probably would be OK to include them in the existing "Comment" field.
Sure, if a true miracle happened, I might locate a series of photos showing the neighborhood, the nearby houses, the view walking up the steps to this house, a person inside opening the door, and the view of the inhabitants of the house as the visitor-photographer enters. If so, the obvious thing to do would be to create an album for this sequence so they would all be together and would be shown in sequence
But I will be lucky to just have these two photos, and just two photos is probably too few for the concept of "album".