To solve your indexing problem, look for a free program named Cathy. It will build an index of all of your drives that is searchable. Since the index is on your hard drive, you can index a removable drive, remove it and still have it included in the index. I have about 20 or so off line drives that I have in my index.
Its a little more complicated than that.
What it would require is for me to go into some sports events and tag individual photos for players or teams. Then create the index that would give me “John Jones” from “UConn basketball.”
For the events where I was shooting future NBA stars, I did do that. I can pull up images of Kevin Durant from when he was 17 years old among other NBA players.
I have all of the folders named for easy access. But when some folders have 1500-2000 photos, getting them loaded up and moved back onto a faster system can be tedious.