Photo organizing ideas

Hello.  I have been taking digital photos for the past 15 years and have been using Photoshop Elements Organizer to organize them.  I would take the SD card out of the camera, upload them into folders with a naming scheme of when they were taken (i.e. 2017-05 Hawaii trip or 2017-05 for everyday pics in May of 17 that don't fall into a category), and then import them into the Elements Organizer where I could tag them with events, places, people, etc. and write comments if needed.  I love the tags because then when I go back to the organizer, I can just click on the tags or people I want, and it shows all of those pictures.  I can also type in something and it will search the comments I may have written.  I understand this is all going to be embedded in the metadata as well and you could search it that way, but I like the organizer as a way to view them.

As I mentioned, this worked well 10 years ago when I only had one camera and we didn't have smart phones, but now the pictures are coming from the DSLR plus two smartphones and it makes it difficult so I am trying to figure out the best way to go about this.  I could keep doing the same thing, and just take them off of the phone from time to time, but I admit I get behind and don't always do that.  Then I lose track of what is on the phone and what I already took off and I don't really want to delete everything from the phone because we probably view them more from our phones now.  I do like the idea of having a local copy on the computer though as it makes it easier to search, but would also like to have them available from the phones as well (some sort of cloud storage).  I like having organizing software too because it makes it easier to tag and search.  Something that would help with facial recognition would be great as well because that is what used to be time consuming was tagging each photo with a name.  Elements has facial recognition but I don't think it works that great unless I am doing something wrong.

So to sum it up, I am looking for suggestions to store all photos from 3 or 4 different devices, keep them organized and tagged, and able to view from different devices.  Thank you!

Adobe Lightroom might be a logical step for you if you're used to PS Elements Organizer. Its an incredibly useful tool for organizing, and it has similar tagging/keywording features.

You need a Digital Asset Management system (like Lightroom or Photo Mechanic) but dealing with cell phones is a royal pain. You'll have to come up with a method to download and archive, then remove from phone. But I can tell you that with the iPhone, it's just painful.

I was going to say that if you have iCloud set up, that your photos will be backed up automatically, however when this happens, in iPhoto, there isn't ability to set up categories.  So your kind of stuck exporting from here into one of the above mentioned Lightroom or Photo Mechanic.  

Carry wrote: I was going to say that if you have iCloud set up, that your photos will be backed up automatically, however when this happens, in iPhoto, there isn't ability to set up categories.  So your kind of stuck exporting from here into one of the above mentioned Lightroom or Photo Mechanic.  

Just to clarify: iCloud doesn't "back up" anything. It is a sync mechanism that is subject to your actions on your iPhone/iPad/etc. As soon as you delete a photo from your phone, it's gone out of iCloud.

That's not the definition of backup.

The only utility of iCloud is commonality across your devices, and sharing with others. That's it. If you want to back up/store/save your images, you must come up with a different mechanism.