[footfootfoot]

The problem that I have isn't about finding vacation pictures from June 2010 or 2010_06_15. The problem is when I have an image that is 750x500 of a pepper and it has been sized for the web, but I need to find the original image that this was downsized from. In this case, it was a scan that was probably left as "Untitled_01.psd" but maybe not. And where was it left? on one of 4 drives I have. Did it get accidentally moved to a completely unrelated folder?

So I have the low res image and I ask the program to search for all instances of that image. If it works as I'd like it to, it would scan all my drives and say
"You'll never guess where I found that file!"

What Pete and Clod are talking about is not really a concern of most pro photographers. What should happen with proper DAM is that when I bring images into the database they all get keywords, later on when I need to search for photos I can, in theory, search by keywords, or exif data (lens, focal length, f:stop, date, camera make and model, etc) but again, this only works if I remembered to do this. And it only works for folders that are in the database, it doesn't work if an image got dragged into some wacky folder like a C:Hobos/Ohio/notdeadyet/stillstinky.