Organizing my thousands of items - catalog or albums?

cyrils64211169  wrote Which is better way to organize with, catalogs or albums. I need sub folders to put below the one chose?

It's not either catalogs or albums... You have to work with catalogs anyway (preferably only one). You may use albums, you may manage a folder hierarchy... and you'll probably find that using keywords (tags) and keywords hierarchies is the most powerful tool.

You add significant keywords to allow for instant indexed search, even for multicriteria queries (people, events, locations, camera exif data...) For easier management, you can create your own categories: animals, landscapes, portraits, sport... And create a categories hierarchy with subcategories similar to subfolders.

Albums or keywords? Let's say you want to group the images for a given event. You can assign a keyword for that event for all its pictures. Easy to retrieve them all. You can also create an 'album', which does not contain any file, it's only a list of files pointing to the files indexed in the catalog. Easy to retrieve all those pictures just like for keywords.

The difference is that:

- albums are lists in which you can set your own sort order.

- Several albums may point to the same files without duplication

- keywords can be 'written to files', that is saved within the picture file itself, albums are just lists only available from the catalog. If you have written the metadata to files, the keywords are accessible to other editing or browsing softwares.