I really like a lot of those. Excellent pattern and abstraction.

I also really like the idea of Noemata, and had a few questions...

What kind of intellectual property rights are in place? Do the contributors dictate it, or is it all under a Creative Commons license, or is copyright just implied?

Also, I was wondering if you have ever heard of the Isaac Browser by Neven Mrgan? It might make a very nice dressing for the site. This is Mrgan's Description:

"Isaac is a PHP image browser. It consist of one single .php file which you can upload to a folder containing images (and other files), rename as necessary, and use to easily navigate between images. It saves you the trouble of making an HTML gallery for your picture collections - with Isaac, just sort them in folders, and upload to your PHP4-enabled server"

I've used it before, and it's really nice. Very easy to customize, but also excellent "out of the box." If you re-title the .php file as index.php, it works perfectly. One of the things I like about it is that he has all of the css written right into the page, but you can set one variable to use a linked style sheet. It's really pretty graceful.

It can be downloaded at http://www.mrgan.com/isaac/

A good example of it being used is at Nathan Young's site: http://ncyoung.com/grab_bag/isaac.php