Since I got my most recent digital camera in May 2001, I've taken 10.5 gigabytes of pictures, over 16,000. I don't throw many away, so I can reach back into a festival in Japan, or a party in New York and get the inbetween moments, upon request.

But the archives are sprawling. I need some kind of system to catalog them. Ideally, I'd like to have each file tagged with attributes like "event" "people" "place" and so forth. My only filing system now is by month; unfortunately my camera doesn't tag my photos with the date and time. I'm going through my archives about twice a month now to find a photo for somebody else; preferably I'd spend a week tagging every photo and then I could use a search engine on my hard drive and find precisely the shot they want.