Best Software for Reference Library with heavy metadata/tagging?

[dpappas]

I am working at design firm and we have an image reference library of around 15k images. A portion of these images are digital photographs, but the bulk of them are scans. I need to find a software that allows me to tag an image with over 30 keywords (i.e. table, chair, armoire, black, leather, velvet etc.) Most of the software seems geared towards photographers who need to keep track of dates, cameras, film etc and not as specific. Has anybody come across a software or solution that would work well for this type of DAM? Thanks.

[Roelof]

What you describe is very standard DAM functionality. You will not only find it in all DAM solutions but in filebrowsers also;
Some DAM examples are Phase One Media Pro, Idimager, Lightroom, etc
A often used file browser is Adobe Bridge

You could even try free software like Picasa, Microsoft Photogallery, Exiftool or XnView to do what you want.
I think it's more important to know how your workflow is going to be (will you be using controlled vocabularies i.e.), then you have to find ou wich software does support that the closest.
There can be found a lot of information about it on this forum and on the dpBestflow site. For example this article about the differences between browsers and DAM's: http://www.dpbestflow.org/file-management/catalog-software-basics#browsers

Roelof