Hi Rae - glad you are getting excited.. that's a great attitude to take when attempting to attack this task head on!

Yes - photo album will do the trick to some degree. It has some nice features like viewing your photos by date and does allow for keywording and minor image correction. However, I'm not sure how well it handles the metadata portion (writing said keywords and other data into the files) which is critically important. You'll always want the catalog info to be also contained in your files so if you move to a different catalog software in the future, all that hard work will move along with the files. I recently did this when I upgraded my computer and switched from Thumbsplus to Idimager.. Once all 30,000 images were in place in the new system, all I had to do was read in the metadata and bingo! My new catalog was created... imagine having to have to rekey 30,000 photos worth of keywords, ratings and other metadata!!!

So, sure - give it a try but check out to see if you can add the keywords to the metadata... commonly called either IPTC data or perhaps XMP sidecar files.