Getting Closer.

There's been a bit more testing, and I think I now have found the best solution for my photo database problem... some more testing will follow, but so far, it does look promising. 

After a bit of mucking around, I now have found out how to import the keywords (proper delimiters are important), and - most important - how and where to import the picture dates so I can sort things by time again. There may have to be some little bit of changing file encodings (there are problems, potentially, with the German Umlaute otherwise), but it does look like I will be able to port everything. Still have to find out where best to shove the comments from the old database, but as I've only ever used those for temporary marking of pics to export, if I lose those, it's no big deal at all.

Just in case you're curious, or are looking for an image database/digital assets management programme yourself, the three in the running were Photo Supreme (the current top dog in my list), iMatch, and Photo Mechanic Plus. They all require a bit of a learning curve.

All three of them also present you, as default, with the "dark" colour scheme. I really don't understand this hype for the dark scheme; it's the same on my phone, about every app wants to go and do the dark thing, and it's hard to convince them (and sometimes impossible) that I want my stuff to be light, light, light. I find it really exhausting to look at a dark screen with light text on it as opposed to a light screen with dark text. I know that some people find the dark background easier on the eyes, but for me, it just doesn't work that well. So it's another point in favour for Supreme that I was able to find a "light colour scheme" pre-selector rather easily, and could switch to a nice grey background that way. (The other two also allow you to change background colours, but it's not as quickly and easily done.)

So. All three are pretty "mighty tools" (which, in geek speak, means "you can do a huge lot of cool things with that programme, but you have to know what you are doing, and learning curves may be steep"). All three will manage large amounts of photos, and all three are mainly geared towards photographers uploading, tagging, culling and sorting their collections and not to weird archaeologists sorting their medieval illustrations with it. With my specific requirements profile (importing data from FotoTime, having weird dates on images, and Umlaute in the keywords and descriptions) all three will need a bit of prodding.

Photo Mechanic does not allow for the import of dates directly, which means that I have a real problem here. iMatch does allow import, and it looked a while like it would win the race, but I keep having issues with actually writing the metadata to the files (that is not done straight away as default, and I've had it write metadata only to find, a few minutes later, that the image still has remaining metadata to be written). So. A bit more testing, probably doing a new larger test import with the parameters and tweaks that I found already, then a bit of working with the candidate... and I'll keep you updated.