Collaboration on the LAN

[James Steiner]

An approach that springs to mind is to use a database file on a
server, outside of the stack, to store the work-in-progress, rather
than storing it with the stack?

Each record of the database would be a picture and a caption, plus
whatever other info it would be handy to store for the images. Maybe
even a yes/no field to mark that the caption is finalized, or a text
field for the copywriter to sign / mark the caption when it's done. 
You stack can then read in the photos, manipluate them as you
described, then stash them in the database as new records. The stack
then can allow one to browse the images / captions in the database,
editing captions as needed. The standard record-locking capabilities
of the database server (or database engine on the client) will allow
multiple users to edit captions on different images.  Once finished
and uploaded successfully, the database record can be deleted. Or the
record could have a field that indicates the image has been uploaded,
or whatever, and the record retained, if you have a need to archive
the images and metadata that way.

I have a much simpler sort of arrangement like this here at work for
edting toolbar icons... though this was implemented in MS Access, the
idea is the same: most database engines automatically handle multiple
users working in a database over the network at the same time.

If you like the e-mail exchange idea, you can likely add a button to
you card to send a brief plain text e-mail to the intended copywriter.
You could get fancy and maybe embed a thumbnail of the image in the
message. But, really, the message just needs to say, "Image # XX in
the database is ready for captioning."  You could even make the
address a record in the database, so workers will know who is working
on which photo.

Hope these ideas help!

~~James.