Thanks to all for the suggestions and much else to think about. Summarizing:
Those who were willing to consider a database suggested: anydbm Gadfly SQLite (included with Python 2.5) Schevo Some preferred using the file system. The core suggestion was to choose a directory structure along with special naming conventions to indicate relationships. Not all who suggested this said how to store info about the files. One suggestion was: Store the info in a text file and read the entire file into memory and do linear searches. Python can search 100's of items in a list faster than you can even begin an SQL query. Alan Isaac -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
