here's what works for me. I take around 7+ thousand photos every year. After I take a group of photos, I add metadata to each photo file with a detailed description of each plant. I select some of the photos and upload them to my Flicker account (currently, I have about 46,000 photos on Flickr). On my local computer, I put all photos in one current year folder. Most photo management programs (like Apple Photos) will index the folder for you and display desired photos of any given plant in seconds. Of course, you can add as many folders to be indexed as you like.
End result, I can quickly search the photos I have taken over the past 10 years or so. The key to doing this is to add metadata to every photo that you take.
oh yes, sites like Flickr read your photo metadata and allow you to search as well.
