The development of digital photograph libraries introduces many technical problems. To develop a useful solution, it is necessary to make it efficient and simple. On the other side, to fulfill its primary purpose of information preserving, the solution has to be based on general principles and to support the gathering of as general data and metadata as possible. A general model of digital photograph library is presented in this paper. The common problems are discussed and appropriate solutions are proposed. The discussion and propositions are based on experiences of development of Groman photograph library.