Looking for an picture management program - ideas please.

[Chris G]

I'm looking for a picture (image) management program to handle a large
collection of photos dating from the 1960s to the present day.

My *main* requirement is a program which allows me to store the photos
in a standard directory hierarchy and which uses that hierarchy as the
basic organisation. My main structure is a series of directories which
are named by year, i.e. I have directories called 1994, 1995, 1996,
1997, etc.  Then within the year directories I have sub-directories
containing the actual images, I want to call these things like:-

    Jan - Snow at Newbourne
    April - visit to Poland
    April - pictures of pets at home
    May - riding

Now the big issue is that I want to be able to sort these directories
containing the images in chronological order.  This basically requires
either that the program allows me to add some sort of property to an
image directory indicating its date or it allows me to sort the
directories manually.

Even if I use numbers for the months (01 - Jan, 02 - Feb, etc.) it's
not a perfect solution because different directories for the same
month will still not be sorted correctly (e.g. April above).

Does anyone know of an image viewing/editing/managing program that
provides this sort of organisation?  At the moment I'm using digikam
which is close to what I want but doesn't provide the chronological
sorting I want within its folder structure.

-- 
Chris Green