Organizer with "Smarts" - Lightroom Classic vs Elements Organizer

I've recently started using Adobe Organizer to manage my media (photos, videos).  I've dug into it pretty deeply and can share a few thoughts.  Firstly, I have some 100k photos and about 5k videos to manage.  I imported all those media files into organizer on a new Mac Media system with all SSD storage.  In it's default mode it still took Organizer a little over two months to do it's default facial recognition on all those images.  Still, since that has completed I've been pretty happy with the results.  I've spent a great deal of time going through and getting real names for those recognized faces.  I'm also pretty happy with that process.

One thing that concerned me with Organizer was whether I would be 'stuck' with the Organizer DB or if it would let me write the metadata collected into my media files.  I recently found the "Save Metadata to File" feature in Organizer.  It took about an hour for me to write that metadata into the files that support metadata tags (e.g. .bmp files don't support metadata tags).  What Organizer does is to write the metadata tags as "keywords".  Generally I find that OK, certainly better than nothing.  However, recognized names with faces are only stored as the name.  That is, nothing is stored in the file metadata to indicate where each face is.  I guess that at some point there might have to be a standard adopted for location information for faces.

One problem I had with Adobe Organizer (2022) is that once it finished recognizing faces in my photos it automatically started in on my videos.  That wouldn't be bad except that it crashed shortly after it started doing facial recognition on my videos.  Every time I would start the software it would immediately crash.  Fortunately I found that I just had time to quickly get in and turn off facial recognition for videos.  That has allowed me to get back to the task of working on the DB.

One other thing I'm a bit unhappy with Adobe Organizer about is that it doesn't seem to recognize the hierarchy nature of folders/directories.  I have almost all my media organized into folders with a date and event 'name' included in the folder name.  However, many of those folders include sub folders with a variety of names like camera vendor names, names I picked suggestive of content, etc.  I find the fact that Organizer doesn't recognize that such content is a part of it's higher level folder awkward.  Still, I'm working on it.

At some point I plan to see if I can use both Aple Photos (which has an option to keep it's DB separate from the media files) and Adobe Organizer on the same media files.  The faces recognized by Organizer will at least show up in tags for Photos.  I would like to be able to pick/use software with the best features and not be stuck with DB compatibility.  Organizer seems to help with that flexibility about as much as seems reasonable at this point.

matthew63719386  wrote Hi, For years I've been hanging on to picasa as a photo organizer, simply because it worked and I had invested a lot of time with the facial recognition to tag a lot of people.  It's (past) time to move on... I'm now looking to switch to something modern (and supported).  I've researched both Adobe Photoshop Elements and Lightroom Classic.  Both seem to provide photo management and organization, but tackle it slightly differently.  I want something local, I do not want a cloud based service for now.

Lightroom Classic CC is not cloud based. All of your photos must be stored on your computer or attached disk, not in the cloud; and the program itself runs on your computer.

1) How "smart" is the smart tagging feature in Elements?  Is it able to learn anything, or are they limited, pre-canned kind of tags like "beach" and "dog"?

I don't know, I have never used it.

2) Both LR Classic and elements seem to do facial recognition.  Is one particular better than the other?   It appears to me that Elements does the smart tagging for things beyond faces, but that LR Classic just does face recognition.  Is that correct?

Yes

3) How different is the experience in both for using as a photo organizer?  I don't care much about editing, I'm just looking for something that can take 100k+ pictures, and help me organize by date, location, people, places, and potentially "things".

It is my opinion that the Lightroom Library Module is a far superior piece of software than the Elements Organizer. I have used both and I would never go back to the Elements Organizer. Not only (again my opinion) does Lightroom have fewer bugs in the Library module than Elements had in the Organizer, but Lightroom has more features as well. Lightroom gives you more options, and many of the organizing tools are easier to use in Lightroom than in Elements. Either can handle 100K+ photos, and can organize by whatever criteria you want.

4) I'd prefer something that doesn't manipulate the original image.  Not sure if either of these applications do that, or how they handle that.

For organizing, neither manipulates the original image. But it sounds like you are talking about editing here (are you?) in which case Lightroom never changes the original image, while Elements does allow you to overwrite the original image if it is not a RAW image. If the original images are RAW, then neither software will allow you to overwrite the original image.

Lastly, in my opinion, organizing is a very human activity and while software can do parts of the organizing task, it can't do all of it, software probably can't even do half of it. You have to put the effort in to achieve organization, no matter what software you use. If you don't then you get lousy organization, or minimal to no organization, regardless of what software you use. So step number 1 would be that you have to commit yourself to doing a thorough job. You can rely on software for some of the work, but that won't really get you too far.

If you're not looking at Lightroom for its editing capabilities, and just considering it for its organizing and keywording and facial recognition type of capabilities, I think you would be wasting your money. Especially if you are considering Lightroom Classic CC. It is subscription only, and is $9.99/month in the US. Of course that includes Photoshop CC and you can look at the cloud based version of Lightroom as well. Another thing to consider is that Lightroom doesn't actually make changes to the original or master images. As far as your keywords are concerned, or your "smart tags" or your facial recognition tags are concerned, it would be necessary for you to export copies of those images from Lightroom in order for them to have those tags attached to the files themselves. The master images would remain untouched, unmodified, none of your identifiers attach to the files at all. All of the information would be stored in the Lightroom catalog which is a database.