Asking for a friend. He has hard drives of digital files going back 25 years. He is looking for a program that would allow him to search by date and possible add to the metadata subject headings etc.
I know LR will do this, but it might be overkill for what he needs.
Any suggestions?
I think LrC would do it very nicely. Especially as keywording can be applied minimally at first but more intensively where and when it is required. It's not like there are only a few photos involved, so the expense of buying LrC would be minor compared with the time that will be devoted to the task; unless he realizes the task is probably huge and he quickly abandons it.
I would suggest that the very first step is for the drives to be clearly numbered or named so they can be quickly found again later on. I mean the actual drives as well as the boxes they might be in. Folders and files from each one should go into folders of the same names within the LrC library with no attempt to reorganize anything this early. This is important, or will become so later on.
Potentially many files will have matching names but that will not matter if the original folder structure is maintained with unique folder names for each source drive.
It is important to keep all of the drives and files within the one LrC catalog. That's the only way to be sure of correctly finding and grouping related files later on without extreme effort.
If intending to develop a new folder structure, the trick is to not try to create the right final structure in advance - leave that until after he has found where the important files are and where the big folders are. Indexing helps greatly with this, as will simple browsing of thumbnails within LrC.
I recommend using keywords extensively but selectively. Do not put keywords into the files - let LrC manage them in its catalog, especially at this early stage. That's what it is so good at. Until there are more than about 2 or 3 screenfuls of thumbnails per keyword then a new keyword is not required to help isolate the better pics. This approach makes it easy to start very high-level and apply detail only where it is needed. If he goes the other way around then the job will never be finished because he'll burn out while creating the ultimate keyword structure before he's loaded the pictures, and the super complex keyword hierarchy will be so much harder to navigate.
Keep in mind that the indexing gradually lets him find stuff by ever more specific topic.
Also keep in mind that keywords can be repeated with different meanings / contexts in different parts of the LrC keyword hierarchy. That, for me, is a very powerful advantage of LrC over a lot of other photo software.
Absolutely do not overwrite or rename or relocate anything on the source drives if it can be avoided. Let the LrC keywords do all the work.
Almost a separate issue; keep image editing to an absolute minimum, and only in LrC.
1. Within LrC, only do the most basic edits - like enough to see an underexposed but precious image, or show that it was a dud.
2. Do all editing in LrC parametrically - without changing the original files. LrC is great at this. That will save tons of backing up edited image files because the files are not being changed.
3. Set up LrC to automatically compress and backup the catalog at the end of every session.
4. Backup those compressed backups to other drives that are not always connected. This is not overkill. If he loses some edits and cannot retrieve them then it is natural to try and recreate them, but that usually takes far longer than the original edits did. If he loses a heap of edits then depression could set in and/or he could lose interest in a worthwhile project.
5. Eventually thin out the older backups because they lose merit after enough changes have been made; they'll simply be too far out of date except in a dire emergency. In short, the time and effort needed to bring an old catalog up to date is greater than start over in the most recent catalog.
6. Do not keep all the backups on the same drive as the master catalog because that's far too risky.
7. Avoid editing photos too early because there could be a bunch of better photos on the next drive, but also avoid deleting poor photos too early because there may no others available.
I reckon that if he takes this top-down approach without bogging down in the fine details of editing or keywording too early, then he'll maintain interest for long enough to see some great progress. That in itself is encouraging and rewarding. Eventually, he'll learn enough about editing that he'll be able to fix even complex photo problems - but by then he'll already know which photos are worth editing.
Norm Shapiro wrote:
Asking for a friend. He has hard drives of digital files going back 25 years. He is looking for a program that would allow him to search by date and possible add to the metadata subject headings etc.
I know LR will do this, but it might be overkill for what he needs.
Any suggestions?
@Alan321's advice is excellent if your friend really wants to get his files well-organized. Lightroom is perfect for that task. But it is a big project, and it may be more than your friend wants to do or is asking for.
If he really just wants to search drives and folders of photos by date, the following site offers software and explanations for how to do that. I note that I haven't used the software, so you or your freind would need to test it out.
There seem also to be some good background explanations about using dates to search for photo files at the site. Again, I have not used the explanations myself, but they seem worth reading.
Norm Shapiro wrote:
Asking for a friend. He has hard drives of digital files going back 25 years. He is looking for a program that would allow him to search by date and possible add to the metadata subject headings etc.
I know LR will do this, but it might be overkill for what he needs.
Any suggestions?
If he's sitting on a literal pile of loose, disconnected hard drives, the first step should be consolidating storage. Figure out the total storage size needed and put all the data on a NAS. If the files aren't already using a common naming format, rename according to date like yyyy/MM-dd/yyyy-MM-dd-mmss-xxx when importing to the NAS. Once all the data is normalized and consolidated, then look at cataloguing. Simple viewers like FastStone are great for navigating large data stores if you have have things somewhat organized at the file level.
I built a couple of programs for exactly this kind of thing: PhotoName for batch-renaming photos by their EXIF date, and PhotoDB for cataloging and searching. They started as personal projects to manage my own collection, but I'm happy to share them with anyone who'd find them helpful.
PhotoDB catalogs your photos without moving them from their current folders - it just creates a searchable database on top of your existing structure. You can search by date range, add keywords and descriptions, and it syncs your changes back to the actual file metadata.
It's reasonably priced at US $40 and they constantly update it to maintain OS compatibility, as well as new camera file (RAW) compatibility, etc. But it's not an 'all in one' developing and cataloging app like Lightroom can be. It's just file management/cataloging.
I actually just did a paid update to version 9 today to squeeze in as a 2025 business expense, which was a modest $25. Otherwise all updates within a major release version (8.x 9.x, 10.x, etc.) are free.
Things I like about it:
Not a subscription!
Reasonably priced and well featured.
Fast.
Frequently updated, well supported over the many years and numerous versions I've used.
The database actually consists of multiple smaller databases. In my case one for each drive I've cataloged. A benefit is that if one corrupts, it doesn't take down the entire collection, though this has never happened to me (yet, haha). It also makes moving/migrating the database to other systems or host locations very easy. For example, I eventually moved it off the OS drive to an external one because I've cataloged multiple dozens of drives and the database became quite large (50+ GB; this is greatly impacted by the size of the preview image generated for each file). But this is also because it contains all copies of my files across multiple back up drive sets, meaning there is a lot of duplication. But this is actually my primary use of the catalog - to keep track of how many copies I have of any given file. By keeping the database on an external drive, I can easily use the app on all of my systems and keep it centrally up to date.
I’m in the middle of such a project. I consolidated over 20 computers personal and business. I downloaded all hard drives to a NAS with the intention of sorting things out later. This allowed me to destroy the hard drives. Personal photo images spanned multiple computers from Apple Aperture onwards. I have a NAS with 5 24GB drives (original storage, final catalog backup and final video storage), a RAID 0 32GB desktop drive (needed for accumulating many images including duplicates) and Thunderbolt 5 8TB SSD (for final image storage) and Thunderbolt 4 4TB SSD (for catalog). In the Apple realm, I discovered that it was important to have the drives formatted as case sensitive. All the family computers and phones backup to the NAS, so most of the video and images were from phones. So, with almost 800,000 images, I had to reduce this to images of interest. I used Lightroom to separate out RAW, DNG and TIFF. I exported these to separate folders on the 32TB desktop and ultimately to separate folders on the 8TB SSD. I removed all JPG (2), (3)..etc files and orphaned them. The JPG that remained were left on the 32GB drive. Video files are cataloged and left on the NAS in a single folder. I then created a new catalog and imported each file type into separate folders arranged by date. I’m still on this last stage, so will see how things go. The plus is that I recovered images that I value and haven’t seen in years. Also, everything is in one catalog. All backup up via Time Machine, Synology backup to NAS and BackBlaze to the cloud.
I ran into some problems along the way. First, Lightroom froze when it used all 64GB of main memory plus a large amount of swap memory and the catalog became corrupt and could not be repaired. Secondly, I initially didn’t have the drives formatted to distiguish letter case. I lost days to corrupted catalogs, but all was recoverable.
It's reasonably priced at US $40 and they constantly update it to maintain OS compatibility, as well as new camera file (RAW) compatibility, etc. But it's not an 'all in one' developing and cataloging app like Lightroom can be. It's just file management/cataloging.
I actually just did a paid update to version 9 today to squeeze in as a 2025 business expense, which was a modest $25. Otherwise all updates within a major release version (8.x 9.x, 10.x, etc.) are free.
Things I like about it:
Not a subscription!
Reasonably priced and well featured.
Fast.
Frequently updated, well supported over the many years and numerous versions I've used. ...Show more →
I also suggest Neofinder, as well as cataloguing multiple volumes, you can also search multiple databases at the same time.
I use Photo Mechanic for this, as it's the fastest tool I've used in terms of system resources used. It's snappy. I've tried Lightroom, Bridge, and another I now forget but Photo Mechanic is the best I've used. I recently started to tidy and organize my catalogue, 60k images roughly. I can set and apply metadata based upon presents to large numbers of files easily, I can quickly rate and rank, and using it to ingest new pictures from SD cards is fantastic. Honestly I wish I'd gone to this years ago.
If I was wanting free, I'd try Adobe Bridge. It's very capable, I just find it kinda slow on my Mac Studio M2 Pro.
Edit: Oh, adding that your friend if they haven't sorted it yet should think about storage and backup needs. I just had a primary drive failure, and my secondary drive also failed. Thankfully In had a third copy, which I'm restoring from now. The issue with my backup strategy was that two of my drives were in the same enclosure, so one is fried the chance is the second will get fried. I've learned from that, and ordered new hardware.
I have started researching Excire and Peakto for getting my photos on my Mac under control. I've got photos in Apple Photos, Lightroom classic, Lightroom cloud and saved all over the place in random structure. I had AI come up with an organization framework since that is not my ADHD strong suit and then it recommended I do Peakto or Excire for the actual consolidation and evaluating.
These are not recommendations since I have just started evaluating, but I'm leaning toward Peakto.
