Photo Archiving and Databasing Questions - HELP!!

Hi All,
I have a bit of a project to tackle and I am hoping to get some help with it. It's kind of two pronged. a) I'm looking for advice on a good program to keep my semi large quantity of digital photo's organized and searchable. Something beyond simple file names and folder labels. I see the option of putting data in the 'tags' of my image files in Photoshop, but it seems fairly cumbersome when I'm facing a broad range of images and sometimes a 100 or more decent Images I shot in a day. I'm wondering about maybe that Adobe Program 'Lightroom' or Apple's 'Aperture'. By the way, I'm on a Mac (No flames please, I don't talk about your computer, leave mine alone please :lol.

My other challenge is a desire and definite goal to digitize the family photos. It will 'eventually' be a tool for someone to tackle the genealogy side, but I'm just looking for a way to, like with my current image making, add relevent data to each picture and maybe have a program help organize them for me/with me. I'm trying to avoid just making scans and them putting the image's 'people' info in a seperate database - a close relative in the computer/defense industry strongly advised against that route because of possible long term file format issues and the surprising ease with which database files get currupted, damaged, or ruined.

I'm thinking that if the images important info is put inside of that individual images 'tag' section, it would be searchable, I presume, and if a file corruption happens, I'd just lose the one image and not the wide ranging information.

By the way - I practice 'defense in depth' with important files. CD's, and duplicate Hard drives. If a drive dies or has issues there is an exact duplicate on hand to switch to and recover with and if the problem takes both drives out I have the Optical discs to fall back on for individual files.


Gives a nice warm fuzzy feeling.

Gosh what a LONG post!

Please respond or message me at your leisure.

Richard

i use lightroom and it does the job very well

Thanks Bubba, I'll be checking it out.
I have a Gosh Awful Memory (deleting swear words!)! and keeping track of my images is actually an 'equivacable' failure to this point LOL.
Richard

For IPTC there's only one real chance... ok two or three, but still Photo Mechanic is my choice, Fotostation and iView Media Pro are other two. Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture are too slow when it comes to applying IPTC to 100s or 1000s of photos.

This might be a 'sorry' question, from the stand point that I for sure 'use' my camera(s) from digital to 35 to 120 to 4x5 well , in my opinion, but I have no flippin idea what iptc stands for! I know it's associated with 'tags' and I definitely love seeing the wonderful info about lens and exposure that provides, but I don't know what I"m dealing with ie: tags. I have a deep and broad desire to learn and know things and I'm wondering where to go to know 'all about' tags. hmmmm
thanks all
Richard

Lens info, shutter speed etc. has nothing to do with IPTC Those info are written into EXIF. IPTC on the other hand is very similar thing, but it contains completely different info. It's filled by photographer, or someone else, but opposed to EXIF, which is created by camera, IPTC is created by human, and contains info about location, date, description of photos (caption), photographer and his/her copyright info, keywords etc. So when archiving photos, filled IPTC is pretty much only way to find out what is where.