I haven’t tagged my photos in 22 years, relying solely on folders with a brief description and the date. But now I realise tagging might actually be a good idea going forward (and back). As it’s definitely getting unrulely.
I’m using PhotoLab and have started going back through and tagging people and places mostly, plus things like “landscape”, “flower” etc. Fairly high level. I have a “home” and “garden” tag which covers a lot of photos as well as a " day out" when we visited some place.
I’m sure some people add way more tags- do you and is it useful to you?
I store all my photos, along with other digital things, on a Synology NAS that has a decent built in photos organizer that lets you do some level of searching, sorting by people, tags, etc.
A likely better, but not free-with-NAS-hardware, option would be something like Excire Foto or one of its many competitors.
Surely in 2025 we will see Excire’s AI functionality in easy to use Open Source.