Organisation of photos and catalogues

[Stephen_C]

Let me start with a little personal history.

I have many years’ worth of digital photos (99% of which are in various RAW formats as I’ve changed my cameras over the years). Originally the photos were processed and catalogued in Lightroom but I abandoned Lightroom for Capture One when Lightroom turned into a subscription app. However, Capture One of itself is not a particularly good digital asset manager.

I had for many years used Photo Mechanic to ingest, keyword and label photos (i.e., adding all relevant metadata) so when Photo Mechanic Plus was introduced I started using that to catalogue my photos. Now that there has been a decision no longer to develop Photo Mechanic Plus I recently moved my cataloguing to NeoFinder (with which I’m very pleased).

What I’d be interested to know from others is how your NeoFinder catalogues reflect the organisation of your photos on your file system. My photos are indexed in folders by year and then grouped in five-yearly folders. So, for example, I have a folder “2020-2025” which then contains folders “2020”, “2021”, “2022”, “2023”, “2024” and “2025”.

When I started using NeoFinder very recently I initially created a single catalogue for all photos. I then abandoned that idea and created catalogues for each five-yearly group before, finally, settling on a scheme where each year folder is a separate catalogue (with those catalogues grouped into five-yearly folders within NeoFinder—so actually reflecting the folders on disk).

The reason I settled on the scheme was because it enables me easily (using AppleScript) to set up a search which can either be for all photos or by specified year or years. I’ve no doubt there are other ways of achieving the same result.

I’d be very interested to compare the approach of others here so welcome contributions. In essence: one catalgoue for all photos or more than one and, if so, how and why?

Stephen