My experience may be relevant to Mark's original post about file management.
Me: heavy Photoshop user, file/folder hierarchy similar to OP's, ie: desktop/year/month/event.
Setup: was a 2009 Mac Pro running CS5 Photoshop/Bridge. Edited & posted 1000's of nature shots (sold some too).
By the time I upgraded that old machine to Yosemite both PS and Bridge were showing their age. Photoshop made what I presume to be deprecated system calls, some commands, eg, anything to do with image resizing would take 2-3 seconds to begin executing. When I went to High Sierra, the last OS the machine would do, Bridge also was crashing and having problems.
Finally decided that a new Mini, maxed out, could replace the Mac Pro, and that Photoshop Elements would serve my editing needs. How did that work out?
PS Elements: OK but clunky (can't create kb shortcuts, constantly have to switch between dummy and expert modes, I could go on) but powerful enough (masks, layers, blend modes, etc) for my editing needs. The Mini supports two hi-res 16X10 monitors, has just enough ports, and with Turbo is pretty fast, so that's OK. However, I began to regret the move for the same reasons raised by Mark: file management.
First I looked at Apple's Photos. OMG! Albums, folders, subalbums, categories, memories, tons of features I neither wanted nor understood, even with a new book (Mojave: The Missing Manual). Import? Why? What happened to my file structure? Where is everything? Is it copying files, moving them or creating aliases? Maybe the first because it was sucking up memory and I have 250 gigs of images (backed up on a separate drive and also via Time Machine).
Then I tried the app that comes with Elements: Organizer. Again got a book (Elements for Dummies) and gave it a fair trial. Again hated it -- messy, complicated, and it didn't do what I wanted, which was, specifically:
- see all my folders in their actual hierarchy
- review the images in those files at any size I choose
- rename a file and quickly select the next one
- drag and drop files into different folders
- select one or more files and open them in the editor with a keystroke
Nothing more nor less. What does that? Why Bridge, of course. Fortunately I was able to re-install Bridge off my old CS5 disk* and now it's running OK under Mojave.
So I'm a happy camper except I'm $2K poorer than if I'd just stayed with my old Mac Pro, an early OS, and CS5 Photoshop+Bridge). Truth is, I never needed to upgrade the OS past Snow Leopard in the first place.
Final note: I think Bridge is on shaky legs and may not survive a new OS. If anyone knows of a simple photo-file management system that accomplishes the above five indicated tasks without "importing" or messing with my files, I'd like to know what it is. In other words, I want another Adobe Bridge.
* Had to add an Apple optical drive for that, but that's OK -- I still rip CD's from time to time and it's real cute, sitting there with a wee Passport drive on the Mini...
