Like most photographers, my stored image count continually rises, to the point that I now have tens of thousands of images. Unless an image is totally out of focus or in some other way unusable, I keep them all. My method of storage is suitable for my needs, with images stored on external drives in a hierarchy of folders. But with time it has become increasingly difficult to locate a particular image I know lives in there 'somewhere'. For example, while on a bird shoot, images are taken of a farmhouse, road, landscape. Not exactly birds, but they're filed away within the bird shoot for that particular session. Easy to tag and/or rate at the time, but a few years down the track ... ?

What I am seeking is a method of tagging any individual image with keywords and possibly a rating, to enable ease of location. I always shoot raw files, using Faststone image viewer and CS5 for editing. Although Faststone has a simple tagging capability where the image can be flagged, there is no function to add keywords for later searching. Apparently Adobe Bridge allows tagging and rating, but these simple advantages are outweighed by disadvantages. I recall trying Bridge many years ago but quickly found it unsuitable for what I wanted to do. I should also state my computer is a PC, not Apple, and I run Windows 7.

A thread titled 'Image location software??' by bobt at the end of 2016 touches on what I'm trying to find, but surely software exists to enable the adding of keywords to enable simple searching.

Thanks for any help you may be able to provide.