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I use the file system. I have old stuff by decade and then subfolders by year.

Newer stuff by year. Subfolder such as 2023-11 Grandma visit

It’s not keyworded, but I’m not about to do that and don’t want to depend upon some commercial software (Like Lightroom) to organize my photos. I like it this way.

I use a simple file taxonomy. I have folders for every year and inside that folder, folders for every month. Sometimes all of that months files are in that folder together and sometimes there are folders for separate events or vacations. Each folder has my raw images as well as the edited images. Also, the images are named using the month and year I took them such as monthyear-#### like November2023-1. I upload my favorites to Google Photo to share with family and friends, (I usually send a family update with about 15-20 photos 4-5 times a year) and I use Amazon’s photo storage service, which is free for Prime members, to store all my raw and edited images. Something cool about Google Photo is that you can teach it people’s faces so you can quickly and easily pull together an album with a particular person or a particular set of people. Enjoy!

What do you mean put them to use?

In terms of file organization I just put everything into folders. I typically have two levels. First level is a broad categorization like Trips, Family, Friends, Events, etc. the subfolders inside are then more specific related to the events followed by a year date. So for example Anniversary 2023, Graduation 2010. I do it this way because when I wanna find stuff, I usually remember what it was, not the year I took it. That’s why I don’t do the date first.

I’ve digitized many old film negatives too and those I do differently. Because they’re my dad’s photos, and each roll had a mix of different subjects and locations, I just did one folder per roll since I process them all together. For those I do date first, followed by several key words for the different subject matter.

You could organize these in a Lightroom catalog and tag photos but I don’t want to tie myself to any particular company or software. I would also not solely rely on cloud backups since Google has corrupted and lost my images before. I do use it but just for casual phone photos.

I’m at around 950k photos and quickly approaching a catalog of 1 million photos/videos in Lightroom Classic.

Like most other said, I have a dual structure, organizing both by folder names and file name and then doing tagging, mapping, and facial recognition in Lightroom Classic.

Folder structure starts with years, then each month, then I do a folder for each day. If there are multiple events in a day then I do say 2023-11-23 1 Thanksgiving Lunch at my parents @ Address and then a second folder, 2023-11-23 2 Thanksgiving Dinner at in-laws @ address. If I shoot with more than one camera I do a subfolder for each camera within that. I like this structure as I can search for things without having to open Lightroom necessarily to find all my Thanksgiving photos for example.

In LR I rename all files to a YYYY-MM-DD_Camera_0000X.jpg or .nef and then everything is sorted, even if the file structure is lost somehow.

Once renamed I do facial recognition scans so I can see how my kids, family, and friends have grown up/aged, then I pin photos on the map for geolocation purposes. After that I tag the photos with relevant information and then move them to my NAS archive which is backed up to a cloud service and syncs to an external HDD at work.

No suggestions on how to “put them to work” really. Maybe getting a SmugMug or Flickr account where you can upload them as well and make them available to your family. I know that Synology has a photo app as well if you get a NAS from them that you can probably share them with your family and friends that way.

To get an overview of all your images, if you are on Windows, you can use the free app Tinta.

You can browse all 90,000 images in one window.

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/tinta/9PLKRM9N4Z47

I use the software Digikam. It allows different views on your images like: sorted by date, file structure, people (it has face detection, but it needs some manual improvements), by tags (you can tag your images with your own categories), by location (if your images saved the geo location.

I really like it alot and with the search function you’ll find old pictures very fast, IF you took your time to tag the images and let face detection run over all your images.

Edit: forgot to mention that its free and open source!

Simple folder structure by date taken: /yyyy/yyyy-mm-dd/originalFilename.ext

E.g Photo_Archive/2014/2014-12-24/DSC003_2769.NEF

I put all contextual information in the keywords or exif/IPTc metadata.

I like this format because I can easily drill down to a desired image if I know when it was taken, and it makes it easier to parse and traverse the tree if I have to script a tool to do something.

Having said that, it’s a hell of a lot easier when they’re digital photos and not scanned. When I’m scanning batches of slides I number the boxes, then use the dates on the slides and similar format: /35mm_scans/yyyy/box#/IMG_yyyy-mm_nn.tif Where filename is the year/month on the slide, and nn is the slide number.

I started organising my files when I went digital in 2004. Simple structure. Year, month, day, subject/location.

e.g. 2023 11 27 Frosty Morning

I separate the numbers by three spaces for clarity Each year has a single folder with multiple folders as detailed above.

I can narrow down my search by year or subject/location

Hi! I’m going through the same process right now. Not quite 90k, but I’m cataloging about 25k photos that I took between the ages of 12 and 36. My process has been roughly thus:

• Organize photos by year in individual folders for each year. This was a manual process that took forever. No way around it!
• Organize by season within each annual folder - Winter, Spring, Summer Fall.
• Use OSX batch rename function to rename all files according to year and season.
• Use Lightroom to resize everything to 4x6 inches at 300 DPI. The early digital photos are way too low-res to be usable and the newer digital photos are unnecessarily high-res. Resizing everything this way makes them print-ready and at a size that makes them practical to post or share right away.
• Use Photoshop + Dehancer to add light film emulation using the Image Processor function. Added Gaussian blur to older, low-res photos to mask digital artifacts. Those photos are blurry, but with heavier film emulation they could pass as super grainy 110 film shots or something.
• From there I tagged the photos that I thought were the best within a given year. I was left with between 400-700 photos per year that I thought were better than others.

Whatever way you go, back it up. I use Lightroom Classic to organize everything by date and process images. I use an internal drive for working on, a NAS for a second on-site backup and a few Pixel XLs to upload everything to Google Photos in original quality without paying for cloud storage. For digitizing you’ll need a ton of patience and some hardware depending on what you’re planning on capturing.

I have successfully catalogued over 350k my photos shot during 20 years using Lightroom Classic
Just import all images in LR and let it move everything using dd/mm/yy folders structure. If needed - rename some folders, make subfolders etc - but do everything within Lightroom Classic now, never do it in Finder anymore.

The DAM Book by Peter Krogh is good