Also, if you are printing the photos, bear in mind that most modern inks aren’t designed to be fade-free! Aside from going down the black and white route (and even then it has to be old-style silver halide ink and not inkjet or laser) there’s not really much that you can do about this.

You’re asking for trouble in using the computer cataloging in the way that you are currently. These packages have been around under 10 years and have virturally zero compatibility between current versions or backwards. Therefore you’re almost certain to lose the info you’ve typed in sooner or later.

Personally I wouldn’t like to depend on solutions relying on features of the Microsoft operating system. The file properties that you refer to have only been on offer since Windows came along and that’s not even 20 years old. Other operating systems don’t support it in a compatible way and file properties are one of the most difficult things to transfer over which is easy to see: manipulate any of your photos and you lose lots of information that the camera saved.

Archiving places currently tend to specify that Adobe’s PDF format is used for any computer media submitted to them but even that’s quite dodgy in that it has changed over the years.

At the moment, I suspect that the only really dependable way is printing and hand labeling but a good second choice would be to upload the photos to your site and label them there. That way they’ll get archived too.

Incidently, don’t forget the archiving. I suspect that we are probably the last generation who’ll be able to look at a photo of their great grandparents. Right now, you can lift up a photo of them and look at it but there are very few devices capable of reading the computer media even as far back as 1990 (ie 3.5 ” floppy discs).