However, if I put what I know, maybe someone else will know better and tell us so! Or maybe someone will know some better solutions for some pieces of the puzzle. I am afraid I don't have a panacea for all file formats (JPG/PNG/TIFF etc) across all OSes (macOS, Linux, Windows) across disparate application software (Photoshop/Lightroom/GIMP and MS-Paint or whatever Microsoft's offering is). If I apply tags in Bridge or another software, will these tags be available to everyone, on whatever platform, if they are using a software that can read them? How does this work? Do they simply open the folder in one of those programs and have the ability to search and filter? Is there anything out there that may help in accomplishing this goal? I've seen that in Windows, you can add tags to files for searching, and in OS X, you can add Spotlight comments (delimited by commas, it can be used as search tags), however, the 2 don't carry over across platforms. I work on a Mac and have Adobe Bridge, but not everyone accessing these images will.

The images are stored on a network drive and accessed by both Mac and Windows users. We have thousands of images and I'm trying to find the best way to 'tag them' so-to-speak. I'm looking to build out a searchable image library for my company.

Someone asked a similar question a few years ago, but I need some additional detail.