I have a lot of photos from site visits to different libraries around the U.S. I ultimately want to share these photos on a website so that viewers can sort by the various tags (e.g. "student study spaces"). The tagging needs to be done on local windows machines (due to users I am working with). I want the website to be as simple and clean as possible.
here are two components (A) easily tagging the exif data on a windows machine and (B) creating a website w/ upload process that extracts and creates tags from the exif data.
I spent a lot of time searching for a good workflow, and didn't find anything perfect. Flickr, Picasa, etc. all had flaws. I also searched for similar questions here on the photography stackexchange but didn't find this question.
So, I am going to provide my best custom solution as an answer below, and then hope that this either helps out other people, or better yet, stimulates an even better answer.