Tidying a photo library without tagging everything by hand

Every few years I try to reorganise the photo archive. Every time I start tagging, and every time I stop somewhere around the two thousandth file. Folders by year and month hold up; anything finer dies on contact with a busy week.

What worked better was searching by description. Instead of maintaining a tag tree, I keep the files roughly ordered by date and let a description search find "the market at dusk" or "bike with the red panniers". That is what the photo search tool does on top of a local folder — it matches on what is in the frame rather than on filenames.

Three rules that stuck

Date folders stay dumb: 2026/09/, no exceptions.
Never rename originals; descriptions live in a sidecar.
One backup that is not on the same shelf as the machine.

Duplicates were the other half of the mess. Exporting from three phones over five years left the same frame four times with four different names. Grouping near-identical shots and keeping the largest is worth doing once, carefully, and then never thinking about again.