How Do You All Manage Your Digital Photographs?

I take photographs of everything; I have a very ‘visual’ memory and the digital revolution has allowed me to take thousands of photographs I wouldn’t ordinarily take. And now with high-definition video on cameras and with camera and video on my mobile-phone too, things are really getting out of hand…

…I must have twenty thousand plus digital images. Is that a lot?

My problem is that these images are scattered all over the place. Most of them are on the (nearly full) hard-drive of an ancient PC and I back-up these onto portable hard-drives but I can never bring myself to delete anything from the memory-cards that I use in my cameras, I just buy new ones. Then, every once in a while, I panic and back-up these randomly onto any hard-drive that has space on it.

This wasn’t really a problem until I replaced my camera (it’s always just the latest small CANON IXUS) and the new camera started renumbering photographs with the same file numbers as existing photographs; I’m now on IXUS number five so the file numbering system is a total mess.

And now I’ve got mobile-phone photographs to worry-about plus I stupidly bought a GoPro last year and now have memory-cards full of video from that too!

So how do I sort this mess out? Is there some software I can use to catalogue and manage these photographs and videos (and that will recognise two different photographs with the same file-number)?