Question regarding image management

I’m really new to this forum, so i honestly don’t know where I should put this question. if I’m in the wrong area, please direct me to the right one ?? I’ve had an account on WP forever, but have never done any design/development using the platform until very recently.

I am a long time developer, but new to WP. I’ve been using primarily ExpressionEngine sine its inception, and of course I’ve dabbled in other publishing platforms.

Recently i decided to start using Wp. And I must say, based solely on the community support I am very happy to do this. There are issues I don’t care for, security and groups being the biggest, but I need some help understanding a few things, so I’m here to ask.

1. Image management. Unless I’m mistaken, every image uploaded to WP is just simply dumped into one unsorted, unorganized bucket. is that true? I have a hard time believing that there is no management in this area. What do you do when you start getting 3 and 4 hundred images? I’m already finding it very cumbersome. I’m putting out my first WP site and finding images that were uploaded towards the beginning require constant scrolling, pagination clicks etc. How do most people manage this? I also couldn’t find a plugin when i did a short search for anything that will help me organize this. I need, at a minimum, groups, or categories, but i would really prefer something that uses folders and a configurable hierarchy. I’m shocked that i haven’t been able to find something, so I’m pretty sure that something is amiss. my guess is my approach is just different. I’m not seeing this the way WP sees it. So if someone could help me understand that, how do you manage your images?

2. User groups, and permissions. I also see little to no information about any sort of usergroups, or permissions management. I did find something along the lines of very basic ‘private’ pages, but I need to manage this in numerous different ways. I would like to, at a minimum, have separated usergroups with which I had granular permissions options.

Can someone educate me as a newbie on these two things? i figure I must be just seeing this wrong because these two options seem so obvious, I think I’m not understanding how WP manages the approach to this.

Looking forward to the work! I will say, I picked up the short code stuff immediately, being familiar with tags, especially since I’ve got a 12 year history with EllisLab, they use a similar process, though implemented much differently. But overall I really am liking WordPress and it’s exciting to finally take the plunge into the platform. I didn’t stay away intentionally, I just happened to fall into pMachine in i believe 2002 (which is the predecessor to ExpresseionEngine from EllisLab) and of course I did custom PHP/MySQL development before that. I’m sure I could horn in some custom stuff, but I don’t want to mess with the core functionality before understanding the best practices.

Thanks for any feedback!

Johh