If you want to manage your photos, there are MANY tools that will do it, many well under US$100.
The basics aren't that hard to understand:
Don't be put off by the terminology and confusion like DAM, ingest, workflow, metadata, jpg, tiff, mov, wmv, IPTC, EXIF and so forth.
It's just that trying to doing anything on a computer means you gotta have thought through all of the detail in depth and that's when matching your needs to a tool, or a set of tools gets harder, but with a bit of care it does not have to be a saga.
It does mean that you need a process (workflow), your own file structure and naming rules, and your own tags. This is crucial to help guide, to keep it consistent, to give you the structured approach, and most important to keep it simple. If it isn't simple then you ain't going to use it!
While heaps of the tools support a workflow and structured tagging, they don't seem to educate/encourage/repeatedly encourage/push/force us to actually have the discipline to use the workflow and to tag the photos! It's probably not that surprising that they don't as the level of nagging or enforcement would probably discourage most users.
In the future '' well who knows. There are tools already emerging that will help. For example Ria does automatic face recognition. Once trained it can automatically tag known people in photos.
So for the present, it comes back to us to actually do the work.
Look at example workflows, file structures and ways to tag. See Information sources for some links and my own examples in Workflow (the process, how to manage your photos) and All time most popular tags. I strongly recommend reading metacrap and controlled vocab, and DAM book chapter. See Info Sources.
I'm reluctant to recommend because:
My tips: