[BigV]

Good question!

I found a bunch that didn't work for me.

Random -- easy to do, impossible to live with.

Date order -- the same.

Short subject name on folder -- still easy to do, but not... not navigable.

Other concepts that are more a part of the problem than of the solution:

Multiple cameras -- unavoidable, so just plan accordingly

Multiple computers -- also unavoidable, but can be networked, or shared etc. combination of problem and solution.

Multiple hard drives -- BIG part of the problem until synchronized. Then, BIG part of solution, especially regarding sharing and enjoying and redundancy.

Oh, you wanted me to answer your question. Ok.

I use Windows, and in Windows Explorer I settled on this directory structure:

..\placeholder dir\another placeholder dir\Pictures\

Then

\2000\01\
\2000\02\
\2000\03\
\2000\04\
\2000\05\
\2000\06\
\2000\07\
\2000\08\
\2000\09\
\2000\10\
\2000\11\
\2000\12\

I repeat this structure for 2001 - 2007.

Then

Under each month I create a folder name with a short descriptive title. Many times I repeat this folder name, or part of this folder name. For example, I have many different copies of \year\month\Kids or \year\month\Misc or \year\month\KidA sport or \year\month\KidB event or \year\month\KidC Bday. This lets me record the "birthday party pics" for different kids in the same year, and for the same kid in different years. I can also record picture taking sessions that happen only once "\year\month\Space Needle trip".

The chronological superstructure suits how I live in the world, how I remember stuff (mostly). For the things I'm not sure of I can "search" for a folder name and get multiple hits "Volleyball" or "Bday" and just get the subset of those folders.

There are exceptions to this method, of course. I have a folder named Misc, a sibling to the year layer of the directory structure. Under this I have \misc\pix and \misc\vids. In these folders I've put a bunch of .... junk stuff that I have accumulated that doesn't really fit anywhere else. At least until I come up with a better way to organize these misfits.

Back to the major structure. I envison adding another feature to the leaf folders described above: ..\year\month\event\outtakes. This will let me segregate the photos of a given event into keepers (focused, composed, interesting pictures) and then everything else. I have a hard time discarding photos unless they're complete crap, but when I'm going through the pictures of an event, it's nice to be able to view and show off the nicest ones first. I can/may even rename the pictures so that they sort properly.

Which reminds me, one of the critical attributes of the files that permit this kind of organization is "Date picture taken". It's in there in the metadata of the file produced by most cameras, even though the default Windows Explorer doesn't show that attribute. This is the hard date I use to determine where/where to put the picture/folder. Not the created date, that's the date the file was created on the disk and I might download from the camera to the computer several different photo "sessions". Not the modify date either. Some cameras don't provide this data, so I wing it.

Even further down the road I envision adding meta data to the pictures themselves, singly or in bulk. Right now the folder says \year\month\kida\bday but the pictures are named DSC00791.jpg. It would be nice to tag the picture with this data too. And with any other useful future search hook. Down the road though...

Did I answer your question? How do you do it? How do y'all do it?