Organizing 20 years of digital photos...finally

hello out there,

i hope i don't get skewered for starting a new thread, i really did do quite a few searches on here but didn't find what i was looking for. I'm looking for some advice on organizing 20 years of digital images. the tiny newspaper in key west where I've worked since the mid-90s 'went digital' in 1998 (imagine a roughly 2 megapixel sensor on a canon body with no review screen and next to no latitude, and to ice the cake, it cost $12,000 and was a piece of crap)

anyway, like many, I'm up to my backside with external hard drives and am looking for a great program (preferably Mac) to catalog all of this stuff. i would LOVE the program to be able to search by date. a friend of mine uses 'catalog maker' and I'm leaning in that direction, but am open to any and all suggestions because as I've always said, when someone needs an image you know you have, if you can't find it, you ain't got it!

thanks for your time,

rob o'neal

I was excited. I thought you had organized the hoard. I'm in the same boat, kinda, I got 100,000 pix from 2013 to 2019. I started out great, got 5% done in the first few months of 2019. But got sidetracked with film work and that was that. No magic to it. Just have to go though them one by one.

You may have lots more work. I just need to find out if they are any good than drop them into one of 150 folders that organizes my work. (more or less.) If some pix can be used in multiple categories I drop copies in the various folders that apply. I hope to get back on the photo purge by mid June or July.

Although my work was organized by year, it wont be when done for the most part. They will just go into categories of subject matter.

Good luck!

I'm no expert. - I'd rely on Picasa, outdated but free and still floating around, to recognize faces for me. + generate thumbnails.

I'd also try to organize stuff kind off "by date" while shooting.

I can share the experience how that doesn't work: My job was to shoot products at work. Order by sysop: to file into *date* folders, partially with product sub folders + renaming every picture inside with product key prefix. - In between one of our media techs promised: "I can do that" and yeah I am lazy... - And no soon I faced stuff I knew I already had shot and I did of course loose track in which date folder it might be... - Poor mouse wheel!

How are your images organized by now? Year_month_gig folders?

Back at the beginning of time, my slides began to outgrow the Airequipt metal magazines I was using, and those magazines proved to be inflexible anyhow.

I started using the numbers on the slides together with the printed date. I also labeled all slides and put a roll # on them in each project or trip.

When I turned to digital and scanning, the system simply moved over. I basically have the images on disk in labeled nested folders and use the old Adobe Bridge together with Photoshop. The scanned slides themselves are archived in metal slide boxes.