Attaching Attributes to Image For Loading to SharePoint Document Library

Question

We currently have a need to create a searchable document library which will consist solely of images. The standard metadata for a file/image won't suffice in this case. We have some custom attributes that will need to be searchable.
Essentially, we will have a library of receipt images for expense reporting purposes. We get these images from a third party who handles all of our expense reporting. There are two large zipped files we receive: one file contains all the actual expense report
"data" that was processed that day(amount, date, client, job, etc.) and the second file contains all the receipt images for those expense report items. Each data file contains data for individual expense reports, and each expense report is assigned
a unique ID. Each line item in an expense report is also assigned a unique ID. Lastly, each receipt image for a line item of a specific expense report is also assigned a unique ID.
The zipped image file only contains images. There is a main image file - this contains several smaller zipped files. Each of the smaller zipped files contains all receipt images for a specific expense report. Each image file name is comprosed of three parts:
The expense report identifier, the unique image identifier, and the expense report line item identifier.
So, to put this all into perspective:
On Thursday, we received an image file named extract_images_p006320452r3_20140904171423
This file contained images for the following unique expense reports:
The compressed file 95FB8C488519427793FC contains the following receipt images:
The "data" file - as mentioned before - contains the actual info about the expense and image. These include: date of transaction, date approved, vendor, amount. GL code, type, function, client, project, billable or not, and several other attributes.
All of this information - including the location of the images - is stored in a SQL Server database and then placed in an SSAS cube.
The images are related back to the underlying data via the expense report id, and line item id.
What I need to be able to do is to somehow "tag" these images with all their underlying attributes, load then into a SharePoint document library, and make them searchable.
I have already figured out that I would need to create several SharePoint lists based on the available values in my OLAP cube (essentially a dataset each for clients, vendors, etc.). The part I have no idea how to accomplish is how to tag each image with
its respective information.
All the pertinent info is stored in the database tables, just don't know how to attach it to each image.
Hopefully, this made some kind of sense. If anyone has any idea on how to even remotely accomplish such a thing, your input would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance!
A. M. Robinson

Answer 1

You will have to develop a custom solution to do this. I am assuming you have taken the first steps to define separate document libraries for the expense reports and images along with site columns and contenttypes. You would define the site columns based
on the data you want to search on and assign these to corresponding contenttypes. So basically a contenttype for expense reports and receipts possibly. You would link the two contenttypes using the expense report id.
Your custom solution would have to break apart the zip files and upload and index (set site column data) for each file. Then the user could search on the expense report id and get all the files associated with the expense report.
An alternative could be to use one document library and have all the files uploaded into their own document set (folder).
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