The Great Photo Reorganization Project of 2026

Jan 18, 2026

Tags: photography organization tech support homelab

I’ve spent a lot of my life, adolescent and adult, taking photographs. I’m a fan of the entire process, from the mechanics of a camera to the chemistry of film to the physics of why a digital camera sensor even works. It’s easily my favorite hobby with video games being a close second, woodworking the third and maybe writing/this website would be the fourth. I’ve spent a lot of that time taking the pictures without any regard for how I use them afterwards. Until Catrena became my number one favorite subject in the whole, wide world, that is. She at least had a vision for where when how & why to use the photos we took together. Now that I’ve got this website and we’ve just had a wedding that garnered us 40000 photos we need to cull through (possible exaggeration) and the desire to use those photos to create something - what that something is I’m not sure. What would be useful to me is the ability to easily browse through our photographs and put them into some kind of collection and add some tags and metadata to help me keep track of them. And yes, this is something other photographers have done for years and years and years and I, without any consideration for future me, hadn’t take the time to do this for himself. At some point in the past, I had Adobe Lightroom… I want to say Version 6 but that became outdated and, if I’m remembering correctly, did not work with Fuji files which at the time I’m talking about, were new. I started using Capture One when I bought my Fuji XT3 - They offered a deal for a paired down version that worked well with the RAW files and that worked great (still does) for our studio shoots and to edit location sessions and make selects and process them out.

As much as I like Capture One, it does not make a good catalog. So this year I’ve spent a considerable amount of time seeking out and testing the software that can help me turn a bunch of random folders of images into a searchable, usable catalog. I have a few requirements! I have some criteria the software needs to meet and needs to include specific functionality so that I actually use the goddamned thing. As I’ve decided to write this now I am pretty certain I’ve already chosen a winner - one piece of software felt as though it was a large step above the rest.

Criteria

So what does this need to do? First and foremost I must be able to access the catalog from my laptop but work on photos that are on a networked drive. Last year also saw me rebuilding my office mac mini into a all new home server and I now have around 40tbs of direct attached storage. I rarely sit at my desk downstairs to do computer work - I’m a laptop guy and will use it all around the house so this is a necessity. Other requirements?

• A detailed taggin system including nested tags
• Some kind of virtual album or collection where photos across albums can be stored together
• A folder structure - this isn’t essential but since I’m organizing my photos by year and then “event” in the finder I’d like to be able to stay organized in a similar way.
• No “importing.” Lightroom made you import your photos and it would move them to it’s own database. This is bad!
• a layout that at least feels a little familiar. The closer to Capture One with the way it lays out the editing tools, the better.
• It needs to work. What do I mean by that? I need to like the way it renders photos, I need to be able to move through the interface quickly, it needs to stay out of its own way.
• Little to no AI integration. Look, I understand this is the direction the world is going, at least until the entire system implodes in on itself, but I don’t want that shit touching my photographs. So if your system if boasting AI for cropping, white balance or anything really simple? Disqualified!

The Candidates

So lets check out what I fooled around with. If you are interesting in taking control of how you organize your photos or want to move (further) away from the Adobe teet, you may find this interesting or at the very least, a faint guiding light in an endless ocean of options. I’m not going into tutorials nor will I go particularly in-depth on any of these, but talk about them just enough to get a general impression.

Tonfotos

The first thing I tried was Tonfotos. It’s a plucky little photo and video catalog program that analyzes every photo in your chosen directory and lets you do some cool sorting options. There is also an option to detect faces and sort by people which seemed to work okay. The first problem with this was the hefty ingestion period. I think it took over a week to get thumbnails made for the folder. This was pretty unnecessary because I dont need this to happen all at once, doing it when I open that folder would make more sense and be less resource intensive, at least all up front. So after a week or more of this thing running away, I was finally able to use it and it did work well. I had some issues with the way it parsed the folders and, as this was the first try of many to come I hadn’t fleshed out my requirements fully, there was no real photo editing. You could rotate which was nice but that’s about it. You are able to make favorites and albums, which is nice, but the tagging features were rudimentary. There is a hefty reliance on exif and metadata for dates, times and locations - there are sorting features based on all of these. All in all, it’s okay software if you really want to quickly access a large group of pictures in chronological order and sort by faces.

XnView MP

XnSoft is a company that makes a handful of specialty, image related software, one of them being XnView MP. It’s hard to classify, as we’ll get into, but at it’s most basic description, it’s a fine piece of photo management programming. It let’s you browse through folders and it will create thumbnails for each. It reads metadata and lets you assign custom tags. Spoiler alert- this software has the most versatile and fastest tagging component out of any of the software that I’ve tried. For a while I was going to rely just on this software to manage my grand catalog even though it falls short in a lot of other (important) areas. Ultimately I kept going in my search because where it falls short is the image editing and manipulation. It works closer to something like Photoshop when it comes to options for adjusting parameters. Double clicking an image will open it in a new view. From the image drop down menu you have your choices for editing. It’s all very basic stuff but you can assign a curve profile, edit the exposure and white balance, cropping, rotation etc. It’s absolutely fine for a single edit every once in a while. It’s not non-destructive and you have to save each edit as their own image when you’re done. This means you can’t make tweaks and you can’t share profiles between images, it’s really not that kind of program. But it parses and displays literally ever format I’ve thrown at it, including affinity project files and HEIC. I think this is going to stay on my computer because I do find it useful but really, the search continues!

digikam

The first entry in the open-source image editors, digikam is a full featured RAW photo editor. It features non-destructive edits, tags and labels, album creation and pretty good RAW photo development. The icing on the cake for digikam is the fact that it’s open source and free. It has a lot going for it but there were a few things that held me back from signing on with digikam for the long term. First, I don’t like the way the software separates itself into three sections; image editor, light table and album view. Album view is the default, and it lets you look through the folders you’ve imported. This is the second issue. You have to import a folder through the settings menu which is inconvenient. It also had a hard time keeping those folders linked to the network drives so I’d have to go in and re-add after being away from the program for a while. And third, the big one, there is no custom tags. You can give individual photos a star rating but that’s about it. There are some useful views that can be setup in digikam, including a timeline and “by date”. There is also a duplicate and similar photo section which seems promising but I did not spend a lot of time messing around with.

RawTherapee

I generally like the way RawTherapee works. It’s a good, open source program that has a lot of functionality and some customization. There are some labeling options like stars and colors, it lets you navigate to any folder you want willy-nilly without the need to do an import and it generally operates well. The color enhancement sliders move quick, the previews render fast and it has an intuitive layout. It would be catalog of choice if it just had custom labels and metadata. There are no custom tags in this program whatsoever. It’s actually a huge bummer because it works really well and doesn’t have a lot of fluff. But without being able to add labels and tags and organize photos into a collection or albums, it becomes little more than a pretty good photo editor. And I have those in spades. There was a moment where I was considering using both XnView MP and RawTherapee in conjunction with one another, which honestly wouldn’t be a terrible setup, but I’m convinced there were better options out there.

darktable

darktable is another open source raw photo editor and manager and a pretty good one, too. When you get started with darktable, you have to add images by folders, and it does not work recursively. Honestly the way darktable handles images, folders and collections is the reason I’m not going to stick with it. It’s actually kind of hard to explain but it wants you to create filters to make custom albums. For instance, if say you went on a vacation from May 1st to May 10th, and all of your photos exif data were correct, you could save a filter under the name “Vacation” and assign it to include only photos taken between those dates. You can combine criteria as well to make very specific filters. But! This is not how my brain works, and I’m not only cataloging photos taken with a modern digital camera, sometimes my exif data is a mess or non-existant! And I would rather be able to look at a list of nested folders, that’s the quickest way for me to find anything on a computer. That or by name, but that doesn’t really work for digital photographs out of a camera, either. Not without properly renaming everything. The other thing about darktable that put me off was how complicated all of the adjustments are. There are plenty of adjustments that are standard across programs; white balance, exposure, contrast, curves, etc. But darktable includes some crazy specific adjustments that mostly serve to clutter up its interface. I think there should be a happy medium between form and function. Also anyone reading this - there is a setting that will stop scroll from affecting the sliders and will just scroll through the modules instead. Finding this drastically increased the applications usability for me.

DxO PhotoLab

I don’t even know how I found this one, looking around a reddit thread where people were talking about breaking the adobe chains, maybe. But I looked it up and downloaded the demo of DxO Photo Lab 9! It’s excellent and I love it. It took me a minute to move the modules around to resemble something that I enjoyed using but after a while I was able to get things setup with my film strip on the bottom, the folders on the left and the adjustments to the right. It allows for custom workspaces as well, which is a nice feature. Nothing needs to be imported, but it will need to generate thumbnails. DxOPL allows for custom tags, as well as hierarchal tags which will render into a nested list. For instance if I want to add something complicated like a country, state and city, you can write it out like United States > California > Los Angeles and it will correctly parse that. The image rendering is excellent; the adjustments that are present feel more like I’m using Capture One than anything else, which is helpful. I found myself working through 2 or 3 sets of photos in DxO in the time it would have taken me to edit just a couple of images in any of the other programs. I found I needed less adjustments to get a photo tuned up in this, if that makes any sense at all. In RawTherapee it felt like I was hunting & pecking and with DxO, I was typing 100 wpm. Okay problem solved, right? What’s the catch? Well that catch is this program costs 239.99. That’s steep! I understand that software costs money and I’m no stranger to supporting companies, begrudgingly and happily, but the thing that’s stopped me from pulling the trigger is two-fold. One, I wanted to really really really really really make sure this is the program that I’m going to spend hours and hours and hours of my life building data in. Is this going to stand the test of time? What happens if this company goes under in a few years, will I be able to migrate that data away from this? My photos are my photos but that metadata, those albums and collections, this is the stuff that I’m going to be making within DxO and I really want to be sure this will be worth it. DxO seems to be solid enough, you never know with tech companies these days though so caution is always good. Secondly, everywhere I looked I saw that there were massive black friday sales… so I feel like it would be okay to wait until this year’s sale to purchase it… if they offer deals I want the deal, so waiting a few months before I upgrade seems okay.

Honorable Mentions

Before I wrap this up, because I feel like I’ve been writing this for weeks, but there were more programs that I checked out that I thought felt worth mentioning. Most of these I spent very little time in because they were obviously not for me, right out the gate. But there are some interesting options and I figure why not.

RapidRAW

If I just needed an ultra fast, simple workflow, RapidRAW would be top of my list. It lets you browse to a folder and make some adjustments to the raw files and export. It’s very quick and clean but that’s about all it offers.

NegPy

Something I saw on reddit, NegPy is built for processing film negatives. Its young and just starting out, worth keeping an eye on to see if it flourishes into something more robust. It is, however, off to a promising start!

Nitro

This program, Nitro lets you choose either your Apple Photos library or self-organized photos on the finder. It has a focus on comparison which I found interesting. Nitro doesn’t seem to like dealing with photos on the network, lots of spinning beach balls while waiting for adjustments to load in. It did also crash once. It seems like a competent piece of software but the interface has too much of a consumer feel to it, even though the image rendering was professional and clean.

Eagle

There is a program called Eagle that people seem to like, it feels more like a replacement for Adobe Bridge, probably the best piece of software that company ever made. I could see myself using something like this in the future but for now I don’t think I’m even going to bother with it - it is NOT photography focused and it doesn’t seem like you can use it to develop photos. I could see this being useful if I really cannot find the perfect all in one photography catalog application, but at that point I’d still probably just rather use XnViewMP.

Photomator

I remembered, last year, hearing that Apple had purchased some photo editing software - Pixelmator and Photomator - both were held in high regard. Pixelmator seems to be really into the AI bubble and has a big focus on vector graphics. Photomator however, has been billed at “the Perfect Lightroom replacement” and has a free trial. I was incredibly disappointed when I first booted this up because it looks just like Photos.app. Like just like it. It integrates with your iPhoto library and that seems to be the only way to get photos in or out. The photo editing is very similar as well, this one was also not for me.

Final Thoughts

What started out as a “I need to get my digital life in order” ended up with me writing a dozen quick reviews about software, I didn’t really see that coming. Just like in real life, I think keeping things organized digitally is easier if you “have a place” for them to go. And sometimes organization doesn’t just mean a folder on a hard drive. I have been working through my setup top-to-bottom. I’m getting backups properly sorted (finally working on the 3-2-1!), I’ve got power management to deal with, I think I want to upgrade my router to some kind of modern wi-fi spec (I’m running an older TP-Link). But if my photos are organized and I know how to properly use them, then I will be able to continue to grow as a photographer, I will be able to look through a digital collection and see progress, or identify the things I like and want to do differently. I’ll be able to share with friends and family and this website easier; notice I haven’t updated a gallery in quite a long time? Up until this point I had been using Apple Photos to organize my film scans and it got out of hand. I’m hoping to be able to keep track of my analog photos better, know what camera shot what and on which film stock, something I’d love to add to the website as well. But I need to have that information easily at hand, and I think using DxO Photo Lab is going to help make that happen. So wish me luck, I’m sure I’ll continue to talk about this either with another blog post or in the /bleets section. And as always, if you found this interesting or useful let me know by dropping me an email.