Making photos searchable (without lightroom)?

I want to make my photos more easily searchable.  I understand we can add words to the metadata of each image, like "chicken, summer, silly" using lightroom... but I don't want to get lightroom just yet.

Are there any good programs out there for sorting and organizing photos?

Someone suggested Xpicks - anyone tried this?
https://xpiksapp.com/

Darktable has tags. It also allows to search by various things.

I have not used lightroom, so I don't know how they compare.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that Lightroom is now a free download from Adobe.  Were your reasons for not going for Lightroom because you didn’t like the price of yet another piece of expensive software?

Eric

Lots of reasons to stay away from lightroom.  Might be something for a new thread as it's going to derail this one really quickly.  

You might want to try RawTherapee. I have not used this software but it sounds good and it seems to be a more ethical option depending on your personal values.

It came up as a good alternative to Lightroom. Here is what RawTherapee says on their website:

RawTherapee is Free and Open Source software. This means you can use it free of charge, wherever you like and however you like as long as you abide by the copyleft GPLv3 license. Download the source code, modify it, and help improve it! We believe in Free Software. ♥

It is cross-platform - you can use it on Linux, macOS, or Microsoft Windows. It is also international and available in over 15 languages!

You can find it on their site here: https://rawtherapee.com/

Here is a wikipedia page about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RawTherapee

It does sound like it does a lot more than you need but it sounds good. I think it might have a bit of a learning curve to it though.

This site has more options: https://pixls.us/software/

The site is the one that I think runs RawTherapee but they support a lot of other free and open source programs related to photography. There are a lot listed on that site--hopefully something there will help.

If you don’t like Lightroom, there are a plethora of editors that allow you to do all sorts of editing.

When I built my first computer (and I far prefer to build my computers—I will never buy a desktop computer ever again) I looked for whatever free software I could find, as I pretty much spent my budget on hardware.  I looked desperately for a good free photo editor.  I came across one called Faststone, which is a pretty sophisticated package for being free.  I do find it easier than Adobe, and while not quite as all encompassing, it is much more user friendly.  I like it a lot and it is my preferred editor for quick editing.

Eric  

On Linux, I use Shotwell as my image tagging/sorting/indexing software.

I can add tags to photos from my file manager, and they get automatically updated into Shotwell.

Eric Hanson wrote:Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that Lightroom is now a free download from Adobe.  Were your reasons for not going for Lightroom because you didn’t like the price of yet another piece of expensive software?

Eric

It might be free in some places, but here it's US$9.99 per month.

Here are some of the reasons why I don't like subscription-based software https://permies.com/t/132117/don-subscription-based-software

I simply click on the number generated my my camera and change it to a descriptive name. When converted to JPG and saved to a file they are in alphabetical order instead of numerical. As mentioned in the other thread when posted to permies they appear with the name at the top and my reason for posting in the description underneath.

that last one is the most important thing. It is mostly lazyness to not do it but it is very effective!

The thing is, I want to add 25 to 50 searchable terms.  Hard to do in a file name.

I think what I need is something that can edit the meta data for the image

r, I think Darktable would work for you.

EDIT: It stores the meta-data in a XML file next to the original (which is never modified).

DigiKam is a very mature, cross-platform, true open source photo management application:

https://www.digikam.org/