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creative_Coast7b94
creative_Coast7b94
Participant
August 19, 2026
Answered

What is the best platform to organize, batch-tag, and securely share 30,000 legacy family photos with 200+ descendants across various devices?

  • August 19, 2026
  • 3 replies
  • 37 views

Our mother (a great photographer documenting the lives of her 9 children / grandkids from 1948 to 2010) has left us over 30,000 negs, slides that are now all scanned.  About half are scanned/edited/curated by her, the rest we need to do the work.  We now have over 200 descendants we want to share this with most use iPhones. some iPad. / Mac and some other smart phones/tablets. 

 

Looking for a great photo editing / organization and sharing solution to do this.  

 

Is Lightroom good at this?

Is it decent at batch tagging people (up to about 50 different people across the 30,000)?

There is no metadata on vast majority but our mom was diligent in identifying each roll with year, month and event type / location when available

What happens if we share html links for finished albums with the 200+ direct family descent?

 

Thanks for any insight you may have.  

 

Frederic

    Correct answer Conrad_C

    If this is about tagging images with people keywords (names) that can be seen on web sites, the way to think about the project is to build it around industry standards such as IPTC, the standard used by news organizations around the world for adding keywords, captions, etc. As long as you choose photo editing software that can export IPTC keywords and a website builder that can display IPTC keywords next to an image, you can do all the work in the photo editing software, export the images making sure to embed the keywords, and those embedded keywords can be read in by any compatible website. What I wrote in this paragraph is not specific to Lightroom Classic, you’ll want to keep it in mind regardless of which photo software and website service you choose.

     

    Fortunately, Lightroom Classic can fit right in with this. You could approach your project like this:

    1. Use the tools in the Library module to add people keywords to images as needed. Lightroom Classic has features for adding keywords in different ways depending on how you like to work, such as drag-and-drop, click-to-apply, autofill, apply one keyword to many images… Lightroom Classic also has face recognition for automatic tagging; although it isn’t the most advanced, it works OK. 
    2. When you use the File > Export command to export images in a website-compatible format such as JPEG, be sure to set the options so that keywords are included.
    3. Once you have a folder full of exported images containing keywords, if you upload those to any website that recognizes IPTC keywords, an image can appear on a web page with its keywords next to it. Some website services that support keywords are Flickr, Smugmug, and Zenfolio.

    Also, the major OSs for desktop and mobile devices automatically recognize IPTC keywords in images. For example, if you send a family member a folder of images with people keywords and all they do is copy it to their iPhone, Mac, or Windows PC, if they do a search using the built-in desktop search (not even opening any apps), those keywords will be found and will list those images in search results.

     

    Note: Lightroom Classic does have a Web module that can generate web pages (not full websites) if you already have a web hosting service, but I haven’t looked at whether it preserves keywords. It might. I wrote my answer above assuming you are thinking of uploading the family images to private pages on a website you created using one of the well-known website services.

    3 replies

    dj_paige
    dj_paige
    Legend
    August 20, 2026

    Is Lightroom good at this?

     

    Hello ​@creative_Coast7b94 

    As discussed by ​@Conrad_C , Lightroom CLASSIC is good at this. The software with the similar and somewhat confusing name of Lightroom does not have manual keywording capabilities at this time, and doesn’t seem to meet your needs as I understand them. Do NOT confuse Lightroom Classic and Lightroom.

    https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom-classic/lightroom-cc-vs-lightroom-classic.html

    Good luck with your project!

      Conrad_C
      Community Expert
      Conrad_CCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      August 20, 2026

      That is a very good point. Although you can add keywords with the cloud-based version of Lightroom, it’s very basic and limited, and would be more time-consuming and frustrating compared to using Lightroom Classic.

      Another Adobe alternative would be Adobe Bridge. It has much better keyword features than Lightroom, but in my opinion Lightroom Classic is still more convenient and productive for this type of work.

      Conrad_C
      Community Expert
      Conrad_CCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
      Community Expert
      August 19, 2026

      If this is about tagging images with people keywords (names) that can be seen on web sites, the way to think about the project is to build it around industry standards such as IPTC, the standard used by news organizations around the world for adding keywords, captions, etc. As long as you choose photo editing software that can export IPTC keywords and a website builder that can display IPTC keywords next to an image, you can do all the work in the photo editing software, export the images making sure to embed the keywords, and those embedded keywords can be read in by any compatible website. What I wrote in this paragraph is not specific to Lightroom Classic, you’ll want to keep it in mind regardless of which photo software and website service you choose.

       

      Fortunately, Lightroom Classic can fit right in with this. You could approach your project like this:

      1. Use the tools in the Library module to add people keywords to images as needed. Lightroom Classic has features for adding keywords in different ways depending on how you like to work, such as drag-and-drop, click-to-apply, autofill, apply one keyword to many images… Lightroom Classic also has face recognition for automatic tagging; although it isn’t the most advanced, it works OK. 
      2. When you use the File > Export command to export images in a website-compatible format such as JPEG, be sure to set the options so that keywords are included.
      3. Once you have a folder full of exported images containing keywords, if you upload those to any website that recognizes IPTC keywords, an image can appear on a web page with its keywords next to it. Some website services that support keywords are Flickr, Smugmug, and Zenfolio.

      Also, the major OSs for desktop and mobile devices automatically recognize IPTC keywords in images. For example, if you send a family member a folder of images with people keywords and all they do is copy it to their iPhone, Mac, or Windows PC, if they do a search using the built-in desktop search (not even opening any apps), those keywords will be found and will list those images in search results.

       

      Note: Lightroom Classic does have a Web module that can generate web pages (not full websites) if you already have a web hosting service, but I haven’t looked at whether it preserves keywords. It might. I wrote my answer above assuming you are thinking of uploading the family images to private pages on a website you created using one of the well-known website services.

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