I have used OS system folders and subfolders to organize my photos by year/month/date since the beginning of my digital photography in 1999. When LR came along, it was easy to adapt to the new software because is support referenced files instead of requiring photos to be ingested into a proprietary database like iPhoto, Photos or early Aperture required.
When I sold all of my pro Canon DSLR gear and switched to Fuji-X cameras 3 years ago, I became disappointed with the RAW conversion of Fuji files from LR CC. This caused me to switch to CaptureOne Pro last year.
Because I have always used a standard folder structure, it made the transition to different DAM/RAW processing software much easier than if I had used the respective software's proprietary database for my images. The standard folder structure protects your images from software obsolescence (i.e. Aperture)
The only feature that I miss from LR is that my photo database contains 145k+ images. LR's catalog handled this number of images easily. C1P chokes on large image databases, therefore, I had to split my image catalogs in C1P to three to reduce the number of images in each catalog. Even with limiting my C1P catalog to 50k RAW images, when I click on "All Images", it can take 3-4 minutes before the program becomes usable. Once I do this once, I can move between folders and sections in the program without delay. I have to remember to select a specific folder instead of "All Images" when I quit C1P or it will take 3-4 minutes the next time that I launch the program before it becomes usable (I get the spinning beachball until then).
This solution was endorsed by C1 tech support as the tech I corresponded with stated that C1P's database contains more image specific information than LR and larger previews. It was recommended to reduce the image preview size, but I found that this made no improvement in performance on my maxed-out iMac 27" 5k. Hopefully, this will be fixed soon in a future release of C1P.
Most pros that I spoke with that use C1P, use sessions for each shoot to avoid any performance hits with large catalogs. That does not fit my user profile as an amateur. I want my RAW processor to also be my complete DAM solution.
Regards,
Bud
www.budjames.photography