Which necessary steps and how much time would you estimate per image?

They probably think they can code something in 5 minutes

"Before I dealt with huge collections as a developer" says the comment I responded to. 88k is not a huge collection of anything from a software development perspective.

The compilation of that collection is obviously more considerable. Archivists at Getty have already said it is about 10 years work for ~20 people.

I guess that depends on what you consider "development" to be?

Yeah, I suppose thats a fair point.

> I didn't consider how much intellectual work went into managing collections as entities

I wasn't talking about the software development side, and I certainly wouldn't call the tech end of this a significant part of the 'intellectual work.' Organizing and managing 88k images is something my laptop 10 years ago wouldn't balk at, serving them is something a low-tier vps could do, and supporting CRUD apps for the archivists, etc are usually trivial. I think you're massively underestimating the importance of other people's tasks in these operations. Even as a developer, the people-focused work-- e.g. working with the other teams to strategize about how tech could best suit their processes, training, design iterations, etc.-- was more work than any technical component.

You're thinking about this from a technical perspective. The content, and therefore structure and logical chunking of the metadata is far more consequential than the number of images. I've seen people in academic environments pour tens of thousands of post-doc-hours into cataloging a few thousand images:

https://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/