Digital Photos--How do you organize them?

DutchmenSport wrote:
All my photos are on my laptop and a back-up secondary hard drive. As we take photos with our Iphones, our digital camera, and I scan actual photos (on paper), I organize by date and then a subject. For Example: Year folder > month folder > day folder > Subject folder (if I need to drill down that far)

2000
2001
...

2015
Under that:
2015_10 (month folder)
2015_10_01 First day of trip to Ohio
2015_10_02 Second day of trip to Ohio
2015_10_02 Second day of trip to Ohio - Train Station
2015_10_02 Second day of trip to Ohio - Winery visit
2015_10_02 Second day of trip to Ohio - KOA Campground
2015_10_03 Third day of trip to Ohio

All photos can be renamed to make them understandable.

I have found doing it this way, it creates a time-line diary in photos. I try to keep them in order by date and time. It's amazing how many times I have gone back to look at something we did on a specific date.

I've been doing it this way all my life now. Now everything is digitized. I've scanned all my photos from, before the day of digital, and have them stored by date. It's fun going back exactly 1 year and see what you did on that date, or go back 2 years and see what you did on today's date. As long as you have a description in your photo file name of where you were at or what the event was, it's easy to pull up when you want to look at them again.

You can also create a spreadsheet and keep a log of your photos and then to find anything, you can sort by date, by subject, by topic, or any way you want. This takes time, but the end result is great! You're actually creating a data base of your photos. Just as long as each photo can be identified and retrieved easily, this works great!

We organize our photos in a similar way. That way we can go back and find what we want. We use Picssa for most of the organizing and viewing. For making photo books we use Publisher. My wife has made many with that service to sell at a local artists gallery.