Hi All, Looking to sort our rather large collection of digital photos. We're nearing to 100k mark and currently they're all sorted into folders by year > date; but we're getting worse and worse at naming the folders and even if we do, some days contain such diverse pics it cant easily capture the contents. Ideally I want to be able to tag photos as good/bad, who's in them, location, etc. so that in 10 years time I can find that one photo of my daughter "riding" our cat without having to search manually through 200k photos! Help!
Adobe Bridge can do most of that [also cataloging photos is the whole bloody point of it], and you'll already have it if you have PS. Lightroom The W10 Photos app, it sort-of can do some it [it'll show the info if the file has it, but you can't edit the info] but... well... i've been berating MS about what a mess it is for a while now... It can throw together video montages easy enoguh though if you ever want to do that. iPhoto if you're that way inclined. Shotwell on linux iirc.
Lightroom (non-subscription) is being put out to pasture which gets a thumbs down from me. Later this year MacPhun (Skylum) Luminar is getting Digital Asset Management so that might be worth a look. It's not too costly either. Also have a look at: ACDSee Pro $69.95 https://acdsee.com/en/products/photo-studio-professional Photo Mechanic $150 https://www.camerabits.com/tour-v5/ Darktable FREE https://www.darktable.org/ Phase One Media Pro SE €189+VAT https://www.phaseone.com/en/Products/Software/Media-Pro/Highlights.aspx RAW Therapee FREE http://rawtherapee.com/ DxO Photo Lab £99/£159 https://www.dxo.com/ AfterShot Pro £54.99 http://www.aftershotpro.com/en/products/aftershot/pro/ I believe some of the products simply browse your current folder structure and allow you to add ratings and metadata for searching whilst others build a database of images a la Lightroom. And of course all these options have editing fucntionality in addition to the DAM.
So how would you do that? You go through your 100k Pictures, look at each one, say good/bad, then add the contents for the good ones? Couple of persons, names, pet names, location, event? How many decades are you planning on sorting? (I have the same Problem, but anything more than Year / Event and deleting(!) the bad ones takes more time than I'm willing to invest)
I use Lightroom, however Google Photos is mind-blowingly good when it comes to cataloguing and tagging, mainly because you don't have to do a damn thing (other than associate a face and a name once, if you want to search by name). I use the Google Photos sync/backup, don't bother tagging in Lightroom any more, just processing - if I can't find something I'll search in Google Photos, which gives me a time stamp, which lets me hone in on it in Lightroom if I then want to print/edit/send/etc. If I just want to view it on a screen, then I don't even need to go to Lightroom. It's smart to the point of being a bit scary - like I can search for "Toyota" and it picks out photos where there just happens to be a Toyota in frame. I can search for "squirrel" and I see all my photos with a squirrel in them, or if I change it to "squirrel eating" it leaves off the ones that aren't.
