Organization Question

[Wow]

I like to collect photos on certain subjects, for instance photos of architecture I like. So let's say I save photos of 500 different homes/buildings and each home/building has 5-10 photographs. What is the best way to categorize them so the photos from each home/building are tied together? Should I do this at the folder level in Windows? Or just throw them all into a folder titled "architecture and do it within iMatch? My only concern is if I do it within iMatch at a later date and I've thrown 100 photos into a folder, will it be obvious which ones I downloaded (go) together?

Obviously I would use iMatch for categorization of metadata such as "kitchens", "landscaping" etc, but I am not sure of the most effective method for that "initial" grouping? In case it matters speed/efficiency is probably the most important to me since these are just photographs I collect for fun and for ideas.

Thanks

[Wow]

Is stacking the best way to achieve this? And if so, is there a way I can easily filter for unstacked photos?
Thanks

[Mario]

Sounds like a perfect job for categories to me.
5 - 10 photos of each house in a category with the "name" of the house. All house category are child categories of a top-level "Houses" category.

You can do the same with hierarchical keywords if you want to persist the information in the metadata of the file.

Stacking is used to "fold" multiple similar photos (e.g. bracket shots of sorts) into one representative image. Stacking is not an organizational feature, it is designed to reduce the clutter you see in File Windows.

And if so, is there a way I can easily filter for unstacked photos?

Easier that the File Properties filter? No.

[Wow]

Thank you Mario. Would this still be your answer if I told you that almost all of them would end up with a generic name like "House 1", "House 2" etc.?

[Mario]

Sure.

Categories are the #1 tool to manually or automatically organize files into categories/groups/clusters/sets...

[thrinn]

Categories are the most flexible way to "group" different photos together. Generic names make it difficult later on to find specific photos, but still provide the information which photos belong together. And I assume you have at least sometimes shots of a more prominent building where you could use the name (e.g. Eiffelturm) as category name.

A simplistic approach like just using a sort order by date/time will fail as soon as you revisit the same place later on and take more photos of the same subject.
You could also try to use reverse geo coding (provided your photos always have GPS data) to pinpoint related photos to the same location or address. But you would need to adjust the results so that all photos of a given location have exactly the same address information. If you take (say) photos of front and back of a building, the reverse geocoding will likely produce different street names.