How do you organize your pictures?

A task that I've been procrastinating can no longer be put off, organizing the family photos. I have boxes of pictures going back to the 18th century that have to be scanned and organized into some semblance of sanity. Being the most technically savvy member of the family I think there's got to be an affordable image database system out there, but I'm drawing a blank.

My dream software would have the following features:

• Shareable online with security so only family could see them
• Taggable so if you can see all the pictures with certain people in them. For example all the pictures with Aunt Morticia but not that creepy Uncle Fester.
• Be able to associate audio with pictures. I would be awesome to get my mom to tell the story of the picture so others could hear it too.
• Be able to handle videos in addition to pictures and audio.
• Not platform specific, Mac, PC, Smartphone, I don't care what you use it should work with anything.

I know I'm not the only one with way too many pictures. Is anybody using software to index and share their pictures?

 

My mother uses google photos

 

Your first and last requirements pretty much leave me at Smugmug.

 

Organize, what's that?

I don't use web hosting, but I organize my folders by subject matter, then date the individual picture was taken. For backup, I load several folders on a zip drive. Makes for quite a few zip drives, but allows me to take them and put them on another computer. I also have duplicate files of many of my pictures on a laptop as well as my desktop.

 

For right now -

Removeable storage - double backed up 4TB Lacie drives.

Folder structure: Photography > Year > Subject Matter > Date of Photos > JPGs > Raw Files

Example: Photography > 2019 > Surfing > 07.07.2019 Myrtle Beach (JPGs in root folder) > Raw Files in a 2nd Folder

I don't want to use any cloud storage, but I'm starting to consider it, slightly.

 

Well, it's months later, and all I can say is what won't work. The best thing I found was a class of software called Digital Asset Management (DAM). It might work, but DAMN! It is expensive, complicated and designed for the corporate world. I found and built a server based on the open source Phraseanet project https://www.phraseanet.com/en/. When I showed it to my very tech savy wife she just noped right out. (she was right, the user interface is garbage). So the search continues . . . .