Organize and browse photos Chronologically

Question

I recently moved from PSE 5 through PSE 7 (2 months using version that came with my Epson Scanner), and then to PSE9. Now I'm coming accross some of fhe idosyncronisities of the Organizer that are discussed in other threads. I'm also seeing where many posters are saying that Folder Location View is very broken and that PSE9 is not intended to be a folder view organizer. There are so many quirks in this version I wish I wasn't so invested in PSE.
Since I like to keep my photos mainly organized by Chronological order and by event or location, I would like to hear how others out there are doing it. I'm finding that the views other than Folder View are no better, and in many ways worse. For example, There are only two ways to view the files in Thumbnail view, Olderst first and Newest First..Well, the photo are all jumbled together without a delineation on date or event. Even if I had the witherall to go through my entire collection and tag them, I don't think the display would seperate them. And the tag isn't readily readable in the display like a folder path would be. Maybe I'm wrong, so if other have accomplished this, I'd love to hear about it.
Another problem in Thumbnail View is the ways that PSE decides the order. I'm gessing here but...  If a photo was from a camera, I then it picks up the Metadata in the file, but if it was scanned in, it uses the scan date or the date the file was created. I'm in the process of scanning a huge number of slides and negatives from times past so these are classified as 'Newer' when in fact I want them to be 'Older'. I think I saw ways to alter the dates, but that means more steps in the process and I still don't get the event organization.
Even if I tagged everything (which is a big effort) I'd still need a  similar organization of the tags. It would be impossible to find things  in Explorer or say another photo browser if I were to use that to  publish my photos online say in Picasa albums.
And the import batch view is totally useless. Who really cares about that? And there seems to be othe quirks there, like the way TimeLine window works.
Well, unless I get an inspiration from some place, I'll continue to limp along with Folder View where I create the folder structure which does give me control of how the files are ordered.
FYI: My main scheme is:
My Pictures
  <year>
      <Year-month Event>
           <Sets, if this was created from sets of slides or film.>
Also sometimes I have other Folders under this because I have a camera that creates subfolders that I maintain when I use the Panarama assist mode where I can stitch together multiple images into a panarama.
Anyway, I'd like to hear how others are dealing with these issues.
Thanks,
DoctorBrown

Answer 1

>I'm not sure I see any benefit to a tag that says Set-01 and Set-02 as I think I will forget what these mean as the years go by. I would use a descriptive tag, such as "Cruise", "Mountains", "Anchorage" etc.
Again, I am creating my primary order to be by Year-Month and order they were taken. Captions, Tags and Albums will be used to fill in the description, location and make groupings for selected shots. Or if useful, Tags can help with this primary order.
These Sets are older rolls of film or slides (I could call it Roll-001, etc, But the slides are no longer in a roll. ) that I've scanned in and have physically labeled as such (with detailed location) and organized in the order they were taken and grouped by the trip I was on. Therefore I can know exactly where to find the slide if I want to go to it. All the rolls from a given trip are located in a folder that is labled with the trip identifier, with each roll in a subfolder. When I went on these trips I'd use like 25 rolls of film. As like many photographers, I take many more shots than I will ever present in a slide show, print,etc. I probably should delete many more than I do, but I keep them. I do plan to further caption them to add this location info.
I am very aware of ability for multiple heirachial tags. I'm also aware that you can attach multiple tags to each image. I'm spending a lot of time getting these onto my system and debating how much time to spend tagging all these older shots. I'm trying to work with the capabilities of PSE so I can use them the way I want.
> I'm not 100% sure I understand what you mean, but if I understand you properly, tags give you this capability.
In the past, you could set the option so that you see the photos in all the folders and then you could scroll through all your photos. The full path of each folder was displayed in a banner line that separated the folders. Similar to how the Batch View does now. I would click on a folder to get quickly to the starting point and then page up/down review what's near that point to select ones for further use. I found that very useful. Also, I really like keyboard operations (Page up, page down, etc) and want a way to page through multiple tags (or folders as used to be the case). The current implimentation of PSE does neither in a way that's useful.  If I could do the same with the Tag heirachy then the tags would be much more useful.
The Batch view has scroll/page capability but the order is nothing like I want to see them. Thumbnail View displays strictly by date and has no concept of the groupings that I want and I can't configure it to do so. In addition, these scanned images are getting dated as of the scan  date but I want them to be in the order by the year-month and order they  were taken. If I have a specific tag on images in multiple folders, I can only see all the photo with that tag in Thumbnail or Batch View.
I also have a whole host of reasons why the TimeLine window doesn't work for me. (but that's for another thread.)
I do realize that not everyone wants to see their photos these ways. But the product should have sufficient flexibility to accomodate a wide range of preferences. I've spent a great deal of time in earlier PSE versions getting things the way I want and changing to a new organizer would entail huge amount of time. So I'm really not relishing the thought of changing organizers. And I still think the editor is one of the best, if not the best, around.