Photo tagging.

If by tags you mean the ITPC metadata fields then probably Photos will be able to read them if they are listed under the Title or Description fields.

If the photos are grouped in folders on your Windows machine in an organized manner that you would want to keep in the Photos library on your new Mac you can import folders and keep the folder organization which converts to albums like this:

How do you plan to add the "tags" to the image files in Windows? If it's not an app that an add to the ITPC fields they won't be readable on your new Mac.

I'd wait until you get your new Mac and import and tag the files while in the library. You can select photos from an event and add the same Caption or Title to all of them at once.

You can add keywords to single or multiple photos and search by keyword

or create a smart album to show common keywords, titles or parts of Titles and the same with Captions.

This is all done via databases which do not take up any additional space on the drive except for the original photos.

bay243 wrote: Hi sorry. Tags as in like if a photo was from a certain event or a tag for say a photo of a car like the make and model so it’s easy to find all the photos of a particular event and such. I should add that I don’t keep my photos in the photos app but rather in folders.

Oh-- I bet you are talking about Finder tags-- the little colored dots, and un-colored dots that can be attached to files that you can see in Finder (and nowhere else!) I use those to identify work documents, pictures, family, and combinations of those and other categories. I'm not sure I think of those as particularly robust. I don't think they survive transfer to another computer operating system like Windows or whatever. These tags are part of the Finder, and many people use them to keep their files straight, not just pictures. Finder tags probably works better for business and family documents than for photographs.

Perhaps you should look at Photos, an app which is designed to organize pictures. Photos uses a database to keep track of all of the pictures and their metadata, and you can search for keywords of your making, along with other information. It also uses AI to categorize pictures, so you can find all the pictures of cars without having to add a keyword for car. Also, pictures can be exported with metadata that any other photo display app in any other operating system can read. And, for privacy, you can export pictures to share that don't have any of that information.

I keep my original pictures on hard drives, but they are also added to Photos, so there are at least two copies of each--that's one aspect of a backup. I do the organizing and editing in Photos. This is way more appropriate than Finder tags for pictures. What do you think?

It isn't clear what you mean by "tagging" Do you mean adding location info, or other kinds of information, like date and comments? How do you intend to do that?

I have used an app to add locations to pictures-- those locations are usually stored in the metadata of the image file, and the location information rides along with the pictures. There are other apps, often free!, that let you enter information into the metadata of a picture directly.

If you use Mac Photos to enter locations, then those are included when the edited pictures are exported, but Photos promises to never ever change the original files. In Photos, you can export the original picture with a "sidecar" file that carries additional information that's been added to the metadata. You may want to add lots of stuff in addition to location. So when I said "locations are usually stored in the metadata," I was thinking that sometimes the information is stored in a sidecar file.

Photos adds comments, titles, keywords, location, and other stuff to the metadata that can be exported in the picture file or as a sidecar.

One thing that Photos does is scan each photo and frame of a video to identify faces that are the same and group them together in the People section of the library. I use it to select all of the files in there (it will ask me to verify additional photos as to if that person is highlighted) and add the keyword for that person.

I don't know if Bridge has facial recognition.

I am bias towards Photos as I've used it and its predecessor, iPhoto, for over 20 years and am familiar with its capabilities. I've never tried Bridge. Another reason for my bias is that Photos is free and Bridge comes with Creative Cloud, a subscription.

I believe Bridge is a digital asset management app like Photos and can be used similarly.

The Photos Library can be on an external drive, as long as it is formatted APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled).