Newbie Needs Organizing Advice!

[dnavratil]

Newbie David here using Photo Studio Home 2021 on 30 day trial basis! I have a collection of about 5,500 JPGs I've download from the internet of Movie Posters of movies I've seen or bought.
I've attached a screenshot to show you some examples. I do not want to change the appearance of these JPGs at all but I do want to be able to organize by Year, Genre, etc. Since theses jpgs are all from the internet I don't see any metadata at all. Will I still be able to organize the files by keywords etc.
I'm really having a nightmare getting around the screen in the software (1st time using any photo software)

[Greyfox]

Newbie David here using Photo Studio Home 2021 on 30 day trial basis! I have a collection of about 5,500 JPGs I've download from the internet of Movie Posters of movies I've seen or bought.
I've attached a screenshot to show you some examples. I do not want to change the appearance of these JPGs at all but I do want to be able to organize by Year, Genre, etc.
Since theses jpgs are all from the internet I don't see any metadata at all. Will I still be able to organize the files by keywords etc.

Welcome to the Forum.

Yes, you will be able to organize your collection of posters in ACDSee.

You can assign ACDSee metadata to your images and just have that association maintained in the ACDSeee database.
You can also choose to embed the ACDSee metadata in the images providing the image format allows for that, and JPG does.

ACDSee metadata can include Categories, Collections, Keywords, Captions, Color Labels (Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Magenta), Ratings (a number between 1 and 5), etc.
These can be added via the Properties Pane, Organize and Metadata Tabs.

You could also use the IPTC fields available from the Properties Pane, Metadata Tab, IPTC Section. IPTC metadata is always embedded in the images.

My personal recommendation is to embed the metadata in the images. If at any stage you decide to build a new database, or rebuild one, the metadata can then always be read back from the images.

I'm really having a nightmare getting around the screen in the software (1st time using any photo software)

ACDSee is very customizable. If you start by only enabling the panes you need at this stage it may help.
In Manage mode, perhaps a layout that would suit what you are doing, would be to have the image thumbnails displayed in the centre Pane, and in the left hand pane have Folders, Catalog, Collections and Shortcuts, and in the right hand pane have Properties (File, Organize, Metadata) and maybe Search. The selection of which panes are shown is from the pull down Pane menu at the top.

[dnavratil]

Greyfox, I do appreciate your effort in answering my post. I didn't want to spend alot of time with software if not able to do what I need. I still have 26 days before trial expires, plenty of time to get use to the program! Thanks again, David N.