Use Adobe Bridge (included with a creative cloud license) and you can add keywords and filter images by metadata (e.g. dominant colors, medium, what you think is cool about it, item it's showing, etc.)
There is the native Photos app which now has both facial and object recognition so you can search through your whole library for anything it automatically tagged as having a truck in it. You can also run multiple libraries in Photos that way your work images and your personal images stay separate (and you can still use iCloud Sync and Shared Albums while running multiple libraries as you can designate which library is your System Photo Library).
You mentioned Lightroom, which while is great in all its features and does have a way to browse through files, it's designed more as a RAW photo editor and not strictly as an asset management tool. For that, you could look at Adobe Bridge. Bridge is popular among creative professionals that need to manage a ton of digital assets across many apps. It has some great organizational features list editing metadata and adding tags and such. I use it a lot as I work in and out of many Adobe apps frequently (although you could use it just as much without needing any other Adobe software).
Mylio is pretty snazzy as well and while they do have a subscription option, their free tier actually isn't too bad. You can still sync up quite a few photos over a couple of devices. It's worth looking into IMO.
Have you considered using Adobe Bridge? https://www.adobe.com/products/bridge.html
While we may implement a similar functionality in PhotoPrism eventually, it's not our goal to replace Adobe Photoshop & Bridge for what they were designed: Editing photos in high quality & going through a huge list of (RAW) files to select the best shots!
Even if our albums would be optimized for handling 25k+ pictures: PhotoPrism will still needlessly blow up your index for pictures you don't even want to keep. It will create a JPEG for each RAW file, consuming storage.
Indexing is an expensive operation that detects faces, gets location information from GPS coordinates, generates titles, etc.... you should do that later if your intention is to delete most of the files. At the moment, PhotoPrism clearly is the wrong tool for this use case.
Adob Bridge is free and has collections.
Yes, it's free.
Adobe Bridge seems to be free, but I don't know what kind of data you can add to the image nor if it works offline in its latest version.
What you want is an "image cataloging tool" and you can search for that, but I've never found a good one. But then your needs may be very different than mine.
Good luck!
> I don’t need the ability for editing photos, just organising by date, face and location.
Don't pay for Lightroom, Adobe gives away their photo management without the editing in the 'Adobe Bridge' product. https://www.adobe.com/products/bridge.html
If you have a subscription just cancel it, or make a new account and don't buy anything. You still have things like the Lightroom phone app and Spark for free. I'm pretty sure you can download Bridge as well.
Edit: just confirmed all you need is a free account. https://www.adobe.com/products/bridge.html
Have you looked at Adobe Bridge? We use that at work for most of our clips. Its not the fastest, or the best, but it works.
It has a very good search-function that also looks for filenames, folders etc. (if you make it do that).
Sample: You also have the possibility to show files that include both "bulldozer" and "city" in the same file, but not if it only has one of them tagged. So it's super easy to find specific clips if they are tagged well.
Not sure if that what you looked for, but its something **insert "it's something"-meme**
before doing anything, read the manual. If you're thinking of using CC, instead of Classic, you'll need to understand Cloud-based asset management first.
Personally, i would suggest using Bridge for your task. There's really no reason to use Lightroom if all you're doing is asset management.
The key to your problem is photoshop... it has a built in function. It's called Adobe Bridge. It comes with photoshop.
https://www.adobe.com/products/bridge.html (in case you didn't have it packaged)
It's probably either your graphics card or your RAW developer not doing a good job.
Try viewing them in Adobe Bridge and see if the issue is still there.