I've got about 9'000 family photos already (made with my own camera over the last 10 years), plus I'm about to start scanning grandma's archive of physical photos (several hundred more).
So I'm starting to desire something better than just a folder-with-the-date system. Even more - I'd like to store extra metadata with the old scanned photos - who the people in them are, where the photo was taken, perhaps some stories about them... Not really sure about all the possible things that could go in there.
After that, well, I guess all the photos should be searchable/sortable by the metadata, and perhaps it should be nice to export a "gallery" or "slideshow" with the pictures & metadata that can be viewed on another computer that doesn't have the sowftware installed.
The metadata format should also be popular/standardized enough that it wouldn't get obsolete in 30 years, though I guess that's something that nobody can predict. I've noticed XMP being mentioned here, that sounds good, though I guess it'd need to be shadowed in a DB for all the searching/sorting.
So, is there anything that can be suggested for a task like this? I know that many professional photographers swear by Adobe Lightroom, but that seems like an overkill for simply an archival system. Expensive too, though I think it came with a cloud-based backup option, which could offset the cost (I'm currently using Microsoft OneDrive as the cheapest option for off-site backups).