OMERO is a far more effective way to manage large collections of microscope image data and metadata. Images can be tagged and annotated with OMERO without affecting the original file. The annotations and added metadata is stored in a high performance database and is searchable. Finding, sorting, and organizing images based on metadata is possible. On standard filesystems the typical approach is to encode metadata into filesystem paths and filenames. This forces people to use slow, inefficient filesystem tools to do basic sorting and searching. These kinds of operations are what databases are good at and were design for. OMERO take advantage of these database technologies in ways that filesystems cannot.