Kevin,
First off, welcome to the forum! Hope you find it a friendly and useful place.
ACDSEE is pretty good for most browsing stuff. I use it for my 'contact prints' and HTML gallery pages (for online proofing). The database facilities in my version (3 or 4, I think) are pretty limited. I understand the newer versions (are they up to Ver 7, now?) are better, but I've never felt like I needed as much as what you're considering.
I usually wind up with a few copies of the image, as well, but not as many as you do.
I shoot in Nikon RAW, so I have a .NEF on the shoot DVD. If I've decided to work up an image, I keep an .NEF of the original plus a .PSD file of each modification that I've decided to publish/print. Each of those versions has a large .JPEG (stored in quality 12 for prints, either ones I want or ones for the model/customer) and a web-sized JPEG 500 pixels across the horizontal and whatever vertically, and sized at 72 dpi. I usually don't do more than 2 or 3 different versions of an image, so that's not a whole lot to manage on the hard disk.
Hmmm... going back and re-reading your message, I guess I DO have as many copies of an image as you do! Even more, maybe, since I keep a large un-compressed JPEG AND a compressed web-sized JPEG of each image.
When I start beginning to fill the hard drive, I'll begin to move the model/customer folders to DVD/CD-R for archiving. By then, I'm usually done with the image, or have lost interest in working with it any more.
Thus, for any one particular model, I wind up with a DVD for the shoot, and a DVD or CD-R of worked up images, which might contain images spanning two or more shoots, to store.
I've got a very simple database built in Access that can cross reference the date versus model/customer...
I've heard good things about Extensis. Some day I might try it, but as I said right now, until my memory begins to go, I'm not shooting enough / selling enough to need to worry about a separate database beyond what I've already got working.
Again, Kevin, welcome!
This is Kaylee...
