[scottburgess]

I think it all depends how you want to find your photos again. Personally I work a lot with smart albums which are nothing else than a saved search which is dynamically updated. That's a thing going through all Apple apps and I like that way of organisation because I don't have to think so much about structures and eventualities. But a lot of people have date-based file and folder names. I guess, you too? Windows as OS has educated it's users to think in hierarchic structures, folders, sub folders and sub sub folders. Lots of clicks, not lots of successful findings.

 

Not too much, actually--my old slide file system was based on searchable tags.  Slides were organized first by subject, but were easily searchable by time, slide number, quality rating, etc...  My digital collection is organized first by time, with limited search capability.  I created index files by year to make searches run quicker, but that's a kludge, not a solution.  I really would like to integrate both search methods in one system.  I have a good slide scanner, but still need labels on the actual slides to distinguish them (and I have about 8000-10000 to label yet, yeech!).

 

I'll take a look at darktable, haven't heard of that one.  Some pros I know are moving away from Aperture for reasons like those you allude to.  I also am concerned at the cost of Adobe's stuff [and the cloud model: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67Iw9q2X9cU], as well as the piecemeal Phase One approach.  Really hope someone has tried fotoBiz or StockView, and can tell us what they are like versus Lightroom as those two have support for slide labeling, though I worry that the customer base and developer cores are too small on both of those for either to be long term solutions.  I want Canon to purchase Phase One outright and create an integrated management/editing program for images and video, but so far that's barely a rumor.

 

Wish some of these products had migration tools from the others, too, but I haven't seen that anywhere.

 

I considered digitizing the slides/negatives by having them all scanned professionally and integrating everything on a digital platform but the cost is too high.  Would rather put that kind of money into a tilt-shift lens.

 

Thanks for taking time to reply, JoJu!  I appreciate the input.