I have one archive for my original shots, and a second archive for
all my finished, worked on shots. All my originals have an index
call "INDEX", and that second archive for finished shots has an
index called "INDEX ENLARGE".

The individual subdirectories in INDEX ENLARGE tell me what
DVD the given finished images are on (124, 125, 126, etc).

And the title of subdirectory 122, for example, also tells me
that the first shot on there comes from July 2, 2005. And the
title of subdirectory 123 tells me that the first shot on there
comes from July 4, 2005. So something shot on July 3rd, for
example, will probably be right in there (i.e. if anywhere,
probably right there on DVD 122 and before the DVD 123 stuff
which begins the day after).

The whole archive is setup pretty much chronologically, and
so by date, relatively easy to go either forwards or backwards
to find what I'm looking for.

And in as much as each of the picture files begins with the
date they were shot (for example 050714-0095-S70-812 was a
picture shot on July 14, 2005) keeping all this stuff in
chronological order is relatively logical and orderly.

Now some folks figure they have a better system because they
label each of their images by individual catagories (such as,
for example, by subject matter). But to be perfectly candid,
who the heck has all the time to label and file every one of
their shots that way? Certainly not me.

And how much time would you spend on labeling and catagoizing
all your images compared to how much time it might save you
later on looking for a given shot? This work might be worth
while if you are a stock agency. But a questionable use of
our time as photographers.

Spending 10 hours to catagorize all shots which later makes
it a 5 minute job to find a particular shots just doesn't
seem reasonable if you can find a shot in 10 minutes with
a chronological setup which saved you 10 hours work of not
having to do any of that tedious catagorizing.

So over the years, while I've tried different methods to
organize my images, I've alway come back to doing things
chronologically just because it's the system which for
most of us just makes the most sense.

And beyond that, one archive for original shots, and a
second archive for finished, worked on shots. And preferably
with an INDEX for each.