Comment by jwr

It's all true, but if you think organizing photo archives is easy, boy have I got news for you.

Metadata, versions, version groupings, projects, albums, there is lots of structure that most people don't realize exists.

Think every picture has an EXIF date and that's the date when it was taken? Think again. Scanning date is not the same as picture date.

Actually, even if you think of a date, you probably imagine the usual ISO8601 2026-01-14T17:37:46Z date — how about when we only know a year? This is something Aperture didn't do either, but when dealing with photo archives what you want is arbitrary precision date intervals. E.g. 1900-1902 for example.

Anyway. Just pointing out that even though "just files on disk" is the right approach, managing those files and their metadata is far from obvious.