Apple Photos - Am I a retard or is it shit?

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I've got almost 20 years worth of digital photos in my library. I've never paid too much attention to it before so the library has gone through various iterations of iPhoto and several iterations of Photos without me doing more than occasionally looking through them. But I now want to organise my more recent photos a little better, and since I'm starting with the latest ones I figure I might as well do the whole thing again. But Photos seems to be a complete load of bollocks.

First problem is you don't have "events" any more - whereas iPhoto used to organise logical groupings of your photos by date and time order, Photos apparently scans your entire library to create "memories", once only, when the computer is new, takes about a fucking week over it, and then doesn't give you any ability to create your own memories or even force a rescan. Result? I've got about 3 "memories" comprising photos taken 15 years ago and bugger all else. I've also got a shit load of old "events' created by iPhoto which Photos acknowledges but won't let me create any more of.

So, can anyone help me make this work, or alternatively recommend some better options for alternative apps? It's more about organisation for me than editing - some of the things I'd like to do are:

1. Create groupings of all my photos (or better still a subset that I've selected) based on logical date/timestamp groupings. I want this so I can label the grouping with the name or location of a walk, for example

2. Select large numbers of photos and update the meta data for all of them en masse, e.g. naming a particular location, person or pet. Apparently Photos does this for you during its one and only scan, but it hasn't done it for me because either I am a retard or it is shit

3. Ability to work with everything locally, by which I mean on my own network or NAS storage. They can fuck off with their fuck-buggering cloud, I have no desire to have all my photos anywhere but in my home.

Any ideas? I saw a Youtube vid where one guys suggests deleting all albums, then creating smart folders based on date, but that still looks like quite a lot of effort. If theres an app out there that isn't too expensive and not made by the knobheads at Apple, I would be happy to buy it.

 

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Can't edit for some reason - point 2 can be ignored as it turns out you can do that in Photos already.

[onlyme]

I'm mixed Mac and PC, sorry not going to be much help but certain aspects of Mac / Apple UI / Apple apps /programs boggle my mind how unintuitive or crap they are when supposedly this is the apex of platforms.  Which I supposeis why  I use a mix of OS's, I can pick and choose to do specific tasks on either. Notice a sublimation printer I just picked up the company  providing the inks and colour profile have just dropped all Apple support, everything, Mac, iPads,IOS,  phones the lot because the machines for some reason don't properly support their  ICC profiles / hardware - WTAF, there would be no Apple if their machines were not heavily used in the publishing sector back in the 80's/90's.   No bother as was just going to dedicate cheap PC laptop to the job anyway, but still.

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2 hours ago, onlyme said:

I'm mixed Mac and PC, sorry not going to be much help but certain aspects of Mac / Apple UI / Apple apps /programs boggle my mind how unintuitive or crap they are when supposedly this is the apex of platforms.  Which I supposeis why  I use a mix of OS's, I can pick and choose to do specific tasks on either. Notice a sublimation printer I just picked up the company  providing the inks and colour profile have just dropped all Apple support, everything, Mac, iPads,IOS,  phones the lot because the machines for some reason don't properly support their  ICC profiles / hardware - WTAF, there would be no Apple if their machines were not heavily used in the publishing sector back in the 80's/90's.   No bother as was just going to dedicate cheap PC laptop to the job anyway, but still.

Completely agree - I switched to Mac about 20 years ago when their advertising tag was "It just works" - and it did, especially compared to Windows at the time. But for the last 10 years at least it's been going rapidly downhill. As you say, unintuitive and just generally a pain in the arse to use. The constant fucking around with iPhoto and iTunes have turned me right off, to the point that I would consider going back to PC for my home computing in future.