You bet they tried. This problem is a bit harder than some standard image recognition project you'd assign to an undergrad. You also bet that many undergrads have failed at this already.

Tagging images by hand is fun... for five minutes. Use a tool that downloads new pics from your camera into folders named by the date the pictures were taken. Then you can mostly reconstruct later where and why the images were taken and tag them when you feel like it (or just leave it). I used Digikam for years while I was still on Linux. It does the job extremely well. It's well maintained with new releases quite frequently. I didn't notice any performance issues with 10k+ photos, and I'd trust it can handle way more than that. Since I'm on OSX I switched to Lightroom. No problems with the migration, all starring etc. that I made in digikam is still intact. Lightroom is just much, much better at deveoping DNGs. That's what it was developed for, after all. Wouldn't want to miss it.

Or maybe the fan noise is your behemoth trying to tell you to move your wife in the spare room so he can spend more quality time with you in the living room.

... if you told him that "you got quite attached to your wife" and that she's "the centre of your (real) life"? He would probably also complain that your wife is ugly and makes too much noise. It's all about feelings...