Personally with some 14k image files I am finding that Bridge is not very efficient at keeping them in their proper places as well as some sidecar files. But I must admit to not being the most adept at ALWAYS doing the right things when I save. I will defer to those whom are currently having success with their applications & would welcome input in advising which are the best.

Thanks Tim for a great subject to discuss.

We can only do some much with drag and drop tagging in web pages and other usability improvements when considering hundreds of thousands of photos.

To some extent you can tackle some of these issues by opening up your data putting it on the web and encouraging lots of friends and family (or collaborator scientists) to tag the data they are specifically interested in (a la flickr or facebook) The trick there is having a common taxonomy, and actually motivating people to do it.

In the end you don’t really need 25,000 shots. There are still going to be a defined number of shots you are going to use for mainstream (newspaper articles, magazine shots) and the rest you generate in the process of getting those “good ones”. But there is an additional “long tail” of photos, that if they are searchable open up new opportunities. Such as the work being done by researchers to recreate 3d models of landmarks from millions of snapshots taken by tourists from millions of different angles. Or sometime in the future an olympic athlete that wasn’t a superstar contender , wins a nobel peace prize, you may not know you need her photo but later you’ll really wish for it. Of course that’s only useful if you can go back and find that photo!