How to manage digital photo collections

[RonixWarrior]

After several years of amature UW photography I have accumulated a large amount of photos archived on my network storage. They are all neatly organized in folders by date with dive site.
My problem now is that I have too many folders to quickly find the photos I am looking for, and am looking to tag and subsequently search them with keywords/metadata. So far I have not had much luck finding a suitable program with which to accomplish this.

(I have found that Picasais fast, but won't manage networked drives without 'importing' all files to the local drive, and Adobe Bridge is slow as molasses)

What software is everyone else using to manage their large photo libraries?

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[asha]

I use Lightroom. It does everything: metadata, search, some editing (for the big stuff, I use Photoshop). I build smart collections based on metadata to group trips and occasions. I keep the last three years' worth of photos on my local (laptop) drive, and archive everything prior to that onto an external network drive. Its automation abilities are superb: Lightroom automatically publishes new photos to my website galleries and to Flickr and syncs JPGs to my iPad.

I really just can't say enough good things about the application.

 

[danvolker]

My wife Sandra uses Lightroom....it is lightening fast in doing anything you could imagine an image program doing.
Sandra is up to around 32,000 photos in Lightroom now....and I recently SPLIT the single catalog file into 3 separate ones of around 10,000 each....as even Lightroom is not meant to index well with over 15,000 images in a catalog...
Now we have ALL PHOTOS catalog, Blue Heron Brodge catalog, and Nudibranch catalog.

 

[RonixWarrior]

Wow. Sounds like Lightroom is the way to go. Thanks for the help!

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[asha]

You're welcome! It's a seriously great app.