How do you categorize/organize your photos when you upload them to your computer?

I use lightroom and I just let it upload it like...

<year>/<MM/DD/YYYY>

But that creates a billion folders. So I'm curious if there's a better way to organize my photos.

What do you do?

I have a folder for each year then for each month under the year and then for the Day-Job under the month for my DNGs. Same structure and file names for the original CR2s.

After importing/naming/conve​rting using Downloader Pro I import the DNGs into Lightroom and use LR to index.

I just let F-spot do it on auto so it's /~/PHOTOS/YEAR/MONTH/D​AY/FILENAME.EXTN

I have a folder for the year, then sub-folders by event/occasion. I throw in a "Miscellaneous" folder also, for 'keeper' shots that don't fit any particular occasion.

I just have folders for every camera. The subfolders are just ccyymmdd followed by an event or location name. If there was shooting on multiple days for the same event or location (such as on trips), I might have further subfolders with just yymmdd. I do not rename the actual files.

As long as I end up grouping photos by shooting day, that is my objective.

I end up with a relatively clean, uncomplicated organization. Easy to find stuff without having to keep jumping to different folders.

I've also started prefixing images with the camera body so I don't end up with 2 images from different bodies with the same name.

Works for me.

An important part of my folder organisation is naming the photos with an ISO like date 2009-10-20_19-23-17-013.jpg. My picture are distributed under broad topics then year and season(it makes sense for my needs). The Iso dates make searches for dates very easy without having to extract exif data on the run.