Cataloging software

[N1ntend0]

For some mad reason I've volunteered to look after my Camera clubs archive - Thousands of Negs, slides and prints plus assorted documents acquired since our founding in 1885.

I used to use PS Album to catalog my own images but don't use anything now, just a good file structure.

I now need a really serious program that will allow maybe 20,000+ images, with a lot of annotation, is Lightroom what I need, what alternatives are there ?

I need to be able to maintain 2 or more independant copies which I'll somehow keep in synch

Is anyone an archivist ? any advice much appreciated.

 

[ghostgull]

Lightroom is great and would probably do you but you may wish to look at iView MediaPro ( though it is a microsoft product now and due to become Expression Media ) http://www.iview-multimedia.com/ it has a really good reputation and I've always found it to be very good.

For what it's worth I've just gone over to Lightroom myself and love it, I have 30,000+ images in my archive so far and it copes very well.

 

[kevin_c]

Lightroom is very good and does a lot more than catalogueing of course, although there is no reason why you can't just use this feature alone.

You can only use one database with it (at the moment) but it's easy to copy this and use it on another machine, although you should be careful to only make any changes on ONE machine at a time and make notes of this, or you will get in a bit of a mess!