Photograp organizer software

[TerryP]

Sitrep:

My aunt sent me some old family photos and we have a fair bit of albums here already.

I would like to get all of them sorted on my computer. I'm planning on scanning them (from a Windows machine) and if possible employing a digital camera to snap pictures of some of ones in already in albums. Then transfer the scanned ones to the FreeBSD machine via network and usb for resizing (I'll probably use gimp for this) and sorting along with the photographed ones.


The Problem:

How to organize them all !!!!


I essentially want to store each picture under a defined root directory (e.g. ~/Pictures/Albums or some thing to that effect). Along with some meta data about each photo (and possibly 'folder' or groups) where available, much like writing notes on the back of a photograph or a note in an album.


Normally I'd do this with mkdir, mv, and abusing the file system to contain information about the pictures.


Does anyone know of a program that I could use to handle this in a more elegant manner? Preferably without me having to write my own file system & SQL backed Qt frontend to organize, view, and store the photos with metadata lol.