Cataloguing your photos?

[Tracey]

I was just wondering (before my storage becomes too messy with photos) how do you catalogue your photos?

Do you use software like Elements to tag your photos?
How do you store them on your drives - by date order, by subject, or how?

I need to get some system in place before too much longer so I can find my photos when I want to look for them... and thats getting more and more difficult as they spread out across many folders and drives

[Grendel]

mostly I let the download software sort it out by downloading into date folders year_month_day then if its important I will edit the folder name to reflect subject, for example at the weekend I was asked to get some pictures of 4 acts at a fundraiser at a little village hall by my wifes cousins husband, so they were catalogued "2011_01_22_godmersham_village_hall_bands" I exclude spaces from the folder names because it has caused problems with older systems. then once everything is downloaded I run a piece of software called toucan that enables me to copy any new files / folders in my 'pictures' section to my external hard drive on the print server so I have a backup copy there too. I only keep about 12 months worth of photos on my laptop drive at any one time, so this software compares the archive folder and the pictures folder and adds any files from the pictures folder that are not in the archive folder, whilst ignoring any in the archive that are not on the laptop.
Grendel

[Tracey]

This year I have started making folders for each month, then a sub folder for each day I take a photo. This is all well and good if you remember when you took a photo.
This evening I noticed on Windows 7 you can add tags to documents. Has anyone here used this built in feature as a catalogue, and is it any good?

[Grendel]

my Canon camera download software automatically puts photos into a folder by date so I just allow it to do that, then when I go through I may add a hint to the contents after the date, eg 2011_01_11_allotment (where the camera supplies the 2011_01_11) as generally you dont take pictures of more than one subject each day. on days when I do take more than one subject I might create sub folders in the original date folder (not so easy for finding specific pictures from scanning the pictures folder) or create a new folder and copy one subject to that (I particularly do this if I need to send out copies of the finished pictures, as this will be the folder I delete the bad pictures from and tweak individual photos in, then I can burn the folder to disc or cd without includin the rubbish ones. these and the original files will be kept unchanged in the original folder.
I would go in and add tags to pictures, but I just dont have the time, I guess I must have in excess of 50,000 photos now (at work I keep track of over 100,000 drawing files, just using the job number and a drawing record sheet) for CD archives I use a dos listing saved as a text file as a searchable record:-

D:>dir /-p/o/s >c:\***.txt

this produces a text file that lists the file name and folders on the cd. these I search using the file containing for any cd archived file, I search the whole folder of text files, and any that get a result get listed along with the name or number of the cd they are on (the text file name is the same as the one written on the CD).
Sorry that wandered a bit from the original subject, but I thought that it might give a searchable way of saving photos to CD.
Grendel