Best way to create a catalogued photo archive?

[RichardDouglas]

I am planning to create an accessible archive of 50+ years worth of photographs, a fair number of them currently in negatives or as prints, the rest in digital form.  I need to go through them, weed out unwanted images, then label and clean up, particularly the older images. My negative files have approximate dates (month/year) and most of the digital images have dates. I have started on the negatives, but find it difficult to keep track, particularly when editing images in Photoshop, as keywords seem to get lost.

Any advice or suggestions on how to use Bridge to create and maintain a catalogue will be very welcome.

Many thanks, Richard

[gary_sc]

Hi Richard,

For something like that I'd recommend that you use Lightroom Classic, not Bridge.

Look, I use Bridge just about daily so I'm not against Bridge and am a VERY big fan. I think anyone who deals with images should add that to their toolbox. But what you want to do is beyond the capabilities and feature set of Bridge. 

I pretty much did the same thing as you, taking family photos from the turn of the century and my slides of the past 45 years, digitized them all and have them in my LR catalog. There, I have keywords for all images, facial recognition for all family members (for whom we know the names), and it's all in a database so working with the images is fast and efficient.

I do not want to take the time to explain any further at this point becuase I do not know if you've already rulled out LRC for reasons of your own or have not yet investigated it sufficiently yet to know how it could benefit your goals here. If you need more information from me, I'll be glad to help. But suffice it to say, IMHO, Bridge is not the best choice here.

[RichardDouglas]

Hi thanks for your reply, just read because I haven't looked at the computer over Christmas. 

I haven't yet looked at using LRC, but would welcome any advice. I envisaged using Bridge because I'm using both LR and Photoshop.  I have folders of b&w negatives and colour slides, and boxes of prints, all going back to the 1960's, as well as an existing LR catalogue of digital images - because the negatives are not all in best condition I've been using Photoshop to clean them up. I've started to label the images in Lightroom, using the facial recognition where possible.  I have a problem with dates, because LR seems to want the precise date and time of every picture, where I've maybe got the month and year, sometimes not even that!  Overall I'm aiming to get an archive which my family can access without specialist knowledge.