I used to work for iFixit (on programming stuff), who produce some of the best manuals in the world (or at least some of the most photograph-heavy). The folks there wrote a short book on how to do this well, and there's a chapter on photography, with links to a bunch of useful guides. Hope there's something in there useful for you! I can also probably put you in contact with them if you'd like to talk strategies.
As far as writing goes, here are a few resources:
Two great examples of documentation for a large and small project, respectively, are Django and Requests.
Just about every project out there needs help in this area. When projects start writing docs, they tend to do micro-level stuff, documenting APIs and stuff, so if you get good at writing high-level user docs, you'll be a great asset.
That's good to know, I'll look into Confluence. Thank you!
I posted this on /r/Manufacturing, as well, and one of the programs recommended to me was Dozuki. It looks like it encompasses some of those features that you're missing.
Yes to all those things. It can be a beating. I've implemented the solar winds help desk (free for one user, very simple VM install) and this http://www.dozuki.com/resources/open-source-projects/ Try it. Its amazing, simple, and free.