2003/
     200301/
            20030102_new_years_party
            20030114_at_home
            20030121_birthday_julia
     200302/
            20030208_a_day_with_grandma
            20030217_photo_session_with_amelie
            20030225_our_house
            20030227_mixed
     200303/
            20030315_vacation_in_italy
            20030320_linda_is_born
and so on ...

All pictures are stored in this hierarchical and chronological directory structure. The top level is the year, e.g. 2003.
The second level is the year with month, e.g. 200302.
The third level is the year with month, day and event, e.g. 20030217_birthday_julia.

Update 02/2006: The above structure contains a lot of redundant information, which may be usefull sometimes. But meanwhile I think a leaner folder structure is sufficient:

2006/
     01/
        01_new_years_party
        14_at_home
        21_birthday_julia
     02/
        08_a_day_with_grandma
        17_photo_session_with_amelie
and so on ...

Pictures of a long events e.g. a vacation for three weeks are also stored in one directory named after the last day (if needed with subdirectories).

The pictures are named according to their EXIF date, e.g.: 20030102-235959.jpg using MaPiVi.

The process

1. Connect the camera or memory card to the PC
2. Create a new directory for the pictures
3. Move all pictures from the camera to the new directory
4. Remove dead and hot pixels in all pictures
5. Open the directory with MaPiVi
6. Mark all pictures to be rotated and rotate them lossless
7. Rename the pictures according to their EXIF date
8. Sort out as many pictures as possible (I really try to delete about 50%)
9. Add comments or IPTC infos to all pictures

Since MaPiVi 0.3.4 the steps 2. to 7. may be done with the new import wizard.

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Storage and backup

We make a backup on CD and another backup CD which is stored at another location (e.g. my parents house).

We bought a DVD-burner and now we are able to burn 6 backup CDs at a time on one DVD, and a backup DVD which is stored at my parents house.

In some years I will buy a blue ray burner and burn 20 DVDs at a time on one blue ray disk, and a backup blue ray disk which is stored at my parents house. And so on ...

So the main facts are:

keep the data on two or more medias
store the medias at different places (in case one house burns down etc.)
copy the data on a new media every few years
convert the picture into new formats if needed

The effort to copy the data on a new media is shrinking over the time, because the data density on the medias is growing. At the moment we "produce" about 6 CD-ROMs each year, so we will have one DVD each year, and later about 1 blue ray for each decade. Ok, the picture size will grow also (until we all have the 1 giga pixel sensor camera, but I still think it will stay manageable.)

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Thoughts

My grandma has about 5 photo albums of her hole life, that number of pictures can be viewed in less than a hour. Since I own a digital camera the number of photos I take is exploding (even if I really try hard to sort out about the half of them). So when I keep on taking so much photos I will never have the time to look at all of them.

So you should always try hard to remove all unneeded, unsharp, ugly and duplicate pictures.
Keep just what you really need, even if storage is available and cheap!

Another additional approach is to tag the best pictures.
That's where the IPTC urgency tag comes into play, I simply mark the best or most important pictures with a high priority. Later I can choose a view to see only the best pictures of e.g. my children.
This can be done in the search dialog of MaPiVi by selecting the proper IPTC urgency and e.g. the name of the person to search for in the pattern field.

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