By now, I have two Canon DSLR and one Canon SLR bodies, and have accumulated about 100k photos. There have been multiple strategies to manage this collection in the last 13 years. In fact, much of my hardware exists in order to host the files.

Lately, great self-hosting solutions to access your photos online have been created, and after some experimenting I have landed on immich. Here, I include my DSLR archive as an external library - immich does not care for the layout, and I can have it the way I like it.

In order to import to the DSLR archive, I use something like the following command:

exiftool \
	-verbose \
	-recurse \
	-dateFormat '%Y/%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S' \
	'-FileName<${model}/${CreateDate} - ${model} - ${FileName;s/[I_]MG_//;s/[.](CR2|JPG)//;}.%le' \
	/source/path/ \
	/archive/path/

This copies all files found in /source/path/ to the /archive/path, creating a folder hierarcy of /archive/path/$model/$year/ and renaming the files to include creation date, the camera model as well as the running number.

Neat.