I agree. Currently, I am trying to make this system help my workflow with one client. He owns some ad magazines, each one comes out every few months. The emails flying back and forth during the creation of his mag (I am the designer) are a pain in the butt and not very efficient, so I'm trying out this system.

In any given release of any of the mags, there are like dozens of ads that require approval and/or feedback through him from the customer...for me, it would be PDF's that I upload, though, not images, but the idea that he could "approve" or give feedback on any uploaded file and have that link to the tasks would really help us out. (Even better would be that I as the uploader of the file might have a choice to allow "approval/feedback" or not, as some of the files uploaded aren't ones that require approval.)

Also, having a page where you can see all files for a project that need approval, and see their status, would be really helpful.

It would seem a lot of this functionality could be done with the current release, no? If you use the files section, you can upload various files (batch file upload isn't there yet) and then also upload new versions of those files (which it will keep track of). Then I'm pretty sure that you can add comments to files and you should also be able to tag files. Then use a "needs_approval" and "approved" tags to help filter out things. The only thing that isn't great is having multiple sizes of the same picture - but if you're doing approval do you really need to approve each size of the same file?

Not that a nice plugin wouldn't be nice, but i think batch uploading is the only thing missing from what you're asking to do (and maybe a more intuitive interface for workflow). Also, you might want to check out Drupal - they have image handling plugins and a nice workflow system that many people use for a publishing-style workflow

I think i might have mentioned this before, but I would send you over to drupal.org - its a content management framework, but don't be dissuaded. All of the features you have asked for are there in the contributed modules, but might take an hour or two of fiddling to put together the appropriate pieces. they have an entire workflow/actions framework that people are using for all sorts of approval/publishing type of applications. And I know there is integration with Gallery2 (and i think also coppermine), plus lots of other image-related modules.

Also, I do understand that viewing the images in the interface is one of the big feature requests in this post. Something else that might make sense would be to edit the source files to make the thumbnails bigger. Make it a 100x100 or whatever. Another option would be to put in a little hack to make the thumbnail clickable or something that would trigger the image displayed larger. I would also imagine that anything too much bigger is going to need to be downloaded anyways in order to properly determine whether or not it is ready for approval.

If you've got specific questions that I can help with, let me know and I'll try to help. Otherwise, if you're willing to throw some money at it, I could be persuaded to put some work into it for you.

this really wouldn't have to be quite as complex as i originally proposed to be EXTREMELY useful.

all that's really needed here is a simple "form" that accompanies a file, that's customizable - for the administrator only - so that each admin can create their own workflow. for example, i'd simply want "radio button" options for:
• approved
• approved with changes [text area]
• make revisions [text area]

and obviously each would be noted with the username and date/time stamp when the client user is logged in.

obviously what I call "simple" may not necessarily be so simple, but hopefully it is! :)

Well, one is approved and one isn't (yet). It's the same as the difference between "beta" and "commercial release" :)