How to organize my photos

After having built databases for my bookcollection, dvd's and cd's, the time has come to start thinking about how to organize a couple of thousands of pictures in either CS2 or Elements 6 - I have both, but it seems like data/metadata is not transferable between the two programs? So do I have to run the process twice?
What are your experience with similar ventures? Problem is that you have to get it right from the start. Changing criterias, means you'll have to start all over again. Any comments are greatly appreciated!

Well PS is not really and organizer. Sure it has Bridge but is mostly for pixel manipulation. Where Elements is for organizing and editing at low level (compared to its big brother PS). So what I do is organize all in Elements6 and if I do any PP it all in PS CS2. That way when the wife want to search for something she can just go into elements and pull it easy.

I don't have Elements, but I'm having the same issues.

I started using the Aperture 2 demo and I really don't like how Aperture organizes photos. I prefer seeing everything in separate folders and Aperture does the whole iPhoto thing (you need to use iPhoto for importing photos or suffer the consequences of 2 copies).

How does Elements handle importing and file folder organizing?

Elements imports and sorts pictures according to shooting days (each day is a separate directory on the harddisk. In Elements you can organize all pictures in Albums and/or by using tags. These basic categories can again be organizes from Top-level and downwards. Say you have set Year as top level album. Subsequently you can name albums acording to events following the calendar. I am reading about the ins and out of the organizer at the moment.

You need to look into DAM (Digital Asset Management) software. DAM software will usually create thumbnails of the originals and store these in a DB. You can then at Metadata against the records such as category data.

Some common DAM software.
ACDSee http://www.acdsee.com/
IMatch http://www.photools.co​m/
Lightroom http://www.adobe.com/p​roducts/photoshoplight​room/
Microsoft Expression Studio http://www.microsoft.c​om/expression/
To name just a few, more compared at…..
http://www.impulseadve​nture.com …flow-catalog-compare.html

I use and recommend IMatch.

I wrote a fair bit more about my workflow and IMatch in this thread here
https://photography-on-the.net …t=345415&highli​ght=IMatch