Consider Bush's Memex... this is exactly how it would function, a vast collection of data on frames of microfilm, with an associative index (an annotation trail

Consider Bush's Memex... this is exactly how it would function, a vast collection of data on frames of microfilm, with an associative index (an annotation trail) that could then dump/copy any chosen trail or subset to microfilm for output. This sounds just like data on an SSD, with wear leveling. It also sounds like my Downloads folder, which I just moved off of said SSD to the cheap huge spinny drive. Having at least one hierarchy helps, for me, that's the date of download. Fortunately that didn't get lost when I moved the files. My photos are all stored in folders like yyyy\yyyymmdd it's worked well for me since 1998. Since only my life, and those near and dear to me, is documented, it's quite helpful for finding things, most of the time. Picassa used to be helpful in finding faces, but there was a bug in the last version which swaps them on photos with multiple faces... oops. DigiKam has some crashy bugs which I hope shake out in the next version.