One more hopefully helpful snippet from my "Sent" folder:
The "image" schema right now is very simple, mostly just a timestamp! Although I've been working on a geotagger and a caption helper app too. I've annotated a sample image from my DB a bit here, sorry no geotag on that but I can find a sample of that if you'd like: https://gist.github.com/3744441 There's also a really basic "basket" (±album) schema that's an array of photo references, and a "source" schema that's also pretty basic. [At some point I want to add an actual "photo" schema, distinct from images in that a "photo" is a "keeper", e.g. the pick of a stack of images as opposed to say a hundred blurry images taken from underneath a balloon or a quick snapshot of a receipt for records. The idea is that human-intensive work like captioning, rating, organizing, etc. should be done on real "photos" rather than all raw "images".]
I'm also guessing that maybe it's a bit unclear how to import photos^Wimages? Sorry if that is the case! I'm something of a perfectionist and wasn't sold on the old way, but also have been busy getting a global aerial tiles service going in the last months, so I haven't managed to make a better replacement in the current default branch on github. D'oh!
If you use the instructions (and design document — it shouldn't interfere with the "take_three" one right now) at https://github.com/natevw/ShutterStem/tree/master you will get sort of a hairbrained scheme to have a (hopefully) secure photo importer controlled via a CouchDB external script. So basically, there's a little Python "import server" that you can talk to via some HTML files you save raw into, say, your camera card. There was some convenient/fun stuff about that but kind of an unexpected user experience and didn't scale to multiple master databases well and such. Some quick instructions, though, are at https://gist.github.com/849343 and when that's done you should be able to use the web interfaces http://localhost:5984/photos/_design/shutterstem/dashboard.html and http://localhost:5984/photos/_design/shutterstem/index.html to import and export sets of photos respectively.
There's a couple hacks I sometimes do to use the import code from the Python shell instead of via the web interface, since the web stuff expects the source folder to be available locally. Once you get it going, though, all the new apps also work with the same image schema. I've got http://localhost:5984/photos/_design/shutterstem-t3/launcher.html bookmarked in my browser to go to some of the apps.
Feel free to ping me if you have any more questions, I feel bad this is in such a sorry state and it does tend to be a bit of a hassle to set up. It's sort of still in a protoyping state at the moment, but once I get http://argyl.es launched next month I hope to have more time for it again.