Cataloguing and storing scanned photographs and images.

[KAM]

Hi all

"General Discussion", it says. "You can talk about anything here", it says. Well, here goes ...

I'm assuming the readership of this forum enjoy cataloguing and management of collections of things, and probably have pretty high standards in their requirements. I'm looking for suggestions or guidelines on the subject of software for cataloguing and storing images. I'm about to embark on a lengthy exercise trying to bring some order to a very disordered collection of images. Some of these are old photographs inherited from from my wife's family and mine. We have many, many, many boxes to work through. Others are modern digital images already. I've Googled ideas on this and seen lots of image management software, image editing software, digital asset management software etc. There also seems to be the dreaded OneDrive, Google Drive approach - "Hey, let us sort all your precious family images. We'll create albums you can share with your loved ones ... " blah blah. I don't feel that's the way I want to go, but I'm happy to be proved wrong. If any of you have strong feelings for or against some software and approaches, I'd love to hear them.

Here are what I think are key points in my requirements -

1. I have no existing system currently in use or planned. Converting from a preceding system is not an issue here. I'm genuinely starting from a clean disk.
   
2. I do have a scanner and having tested it on a range of photographs (some printed as far back as 1909) produces good-enough quality images for my requirements.
3. I suspect I need the ability to add lots of tags to each image - people, locations, events etc (I also assume the ability to search or filter by these is essential.)
4. I would like the ability to add comments to images - much more extensive than individual tags.
5. Many of the old photographs already have writing on their reverse. If I scan both sides, is there any standard convention for linking the resulting two images (by name or tag etc), or should I just combine them in a single larger image?
6. I would like to share certain images on an irregular basis with other family members. Immediately my wife and I would both require equal access to all images accessed from two separate PCs. Do cataloguing apps allow images to reside on a NAS or even in a cloud-storage location? (Note: I'm not referring to back-up. I've had a well-proven cloud back-up contract for many years. I'll continue with this. I'm referring to real-time sharing)
7. Longer-term, I'd like a solution that other family members can use to view images, tags and comments. Perhaps with restrictions to the range of images to which they have access.

Any ideas, suggestions or discussion generally would be very helpful.

Thanks in advance

Ken