How do you organize your photos?

I organize my pictures c:\Canon 1Ds\September 09\img000.jpg
Naturally year and month changes.
But I am having a bit of problem when I need to find a old picture. Neither don't know when I have taken the picture nor which body I have used.
I was thinking maybe I should re-organize by subject since date can be located by EXIF data.
So, how do you do it?

Look at the similar threads at the bottom left of the page, there are five relevant threads there.

I use Lightroom to manage my photos but I also used the same basic organization when I used other Digital Asset Managers like iView Media Pro.

My photos are saved on the following path:
Photos\Year\MM-DD

Where Photos is the name of the hard drive
Year is the year in four-digit format
and the last folder is the month-day.

Since I use a DAM saving by camera name and folder date is unnecessary since I can easily search the EXIF. The big advantage of using a DAM is the ability to add keyword tags to each photo (subject name, location, event, etc.) which makes finding them a breeze.

For a long time, I'd used simlar to pixelMagic above,
But I found it makes a TON of folders to search through, so starting in 2009 I'm using this:

C:\Pictures\YEAR\filename

Where year is the 4-digit year,
and when I import my photos to LR, I have it prefix my image name with the date, for example: 20090822_0048.CR2

That image was taken on 8-22-2009

I'm another Lightroom user, so for my purposes I normally name my folders and files for date, description and sequence number, and then they are stored on external drives in folders for the year.

Lightroom has nice keywording and exif searching functions that are built into the interface, so that you can, for example, show all shots taken of a particular person (keyword) with a particular camera and a particular lens (exif).

Lightroom creates a directory structure based on shooting date. I create a Collection (a play list) for each event I shoot. I also assign keywords to my images, so finding things is very easy.

One word: Keywords

On a side note, in case OP's not a LR user, I believe Picasa can also can organize by keyword tags, etc. In fact the newest version 3.5 released recently, which reportedly can find faces... let you identify them, then gives name suggestions whenever it finds similar ones on new images. I've never used it yet myself, however.

Also, Elements organizer does keyword tags quite nicely (in many ways I prefer it to LR's Keyword tagging.)

I agree that Elements has a pretty nifty organizer. What I don't recall is how extensive its Exif search function is. Is it easy to do like I described above, as in click on a keyword (person), a camera model and a lens (exif) to see all pics with that comination? If so, it's good to know that people have that option.

yuribox wrote in post #8698008
I organize my pictures c:\Canon 1Ds\September 09\img000.jpg

So, how do you do it?

Pictures\2009\09-September\2009-09-21 Beach Vacation\Beach Vacation 2009-09-21 13:49:22.jpg

Using this method all files are organized by date and are in sequence in their respective folders. Adding a useful name to the folder and/or file makes it easier for searching.

Using some type of image management software will make organization easier and many programs can also extract this information from the picture Exif data. For instance, using Lightroom or Aperture, I type the subject "Beach Vacation" and all other information and folder structure is done automatically.

Other information such as camera model can also be tracked and searched through your image management software.

tonylong wrote in post #8698506
I agree that Elements has a pretty nifty organizer. What I don't recall is how extensive its Exif search function is. Is it easy to do like I described above, as in click on a keyword (person), a camera model and a lens (exif) to see all pics with that comination? If so, it's good to know that people have that option.

Honestly, I can't recall (been awhile since I've done it there) but I think you are right. PSE is not as flexible and powerful as LR's search, which I appreciate... but I find Elements much more elegant as far as simple keyword searches.


edit:
Sorry got distracted by Picasa there... I just installed 3.5, and started playing with the face tagging... in just a couple minutes, I must say I'm impressed... I tagged a few of my son with his name, and so far every suggestion its given has been correct. Hope Adobe is watching!!!!


2nd edit:
Ok... one more update... I'm even MORE impressed, its suggesting pictures of my son as a baby too (The template I gave was for a 5 year old.)

Final edit:
Ok... it is missing some, but seems the more you feed it the better its suggestions are. Its not perfect by any means, but would be a great tool for someone who needs to tag a TON of images for the first time... and the suggestions would definitely be a nice work-flow addition upon importing images to a product like LR.