Need advise on digital photo organization.

[nicholsjm]

Good evening all,
In addition to the thousands of photos I have taken over the years, I'm in the process of scanning in my families photos, some dating back to the 40's and earlier. My ultimate goal is to get all of the photos saved onto hard drives that will be stored in a few locations in the worst case scenario of anything ever happening to our house, and also to have something that can be easily passed down to future generations.. Does anyone have any ideas on how best to organize these? I know there are good "digital photo album" programs out there, but I'm concerned about the ability to save all of that information onto various hard drives and still obtain all of the tagging. Am I just going to need to use the file names as the descriptors?
Thanks for your help!

 

[2WheelPhoto]

Adobe Lightroom 3.4 is what I like, see it at photo management software | Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3

 

[shmne]

Honestly I like handling the files themselves! what I do is this :Year - Months. Each item being an individual folder. So inside the year folder are 12 month folders, and inside the month folders are the photos. I average about 500 images every day, so inside the month folder I also have actual days (as well as sunday / monday / etc) to further organize my mess. I have about 10 years of photos now, from 2001-2011 so I have 10 year folders and obviously 120 month folders (the empty ones I label with an "e" on the end so that I know to skip them).

What is nice about this system is that I have a template folder so every year I just copy the template and my entire year is ready to go! It is very efficient, and is a system I find works flawlessly. Although one more step I take is generally keeping my Business photos separate from my Personal photos. I don't specify more than that though!

Hope this was understandable

 

[KmH]

There are other considerations beyond a file naming scheme, like tags and EXIF data.

Someone wrote a book pertinent to the thread: The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers