Organizing photos on your hard drives

[mrlarter]

I've been looking into for quite some time a good program to sort the various photos on my computer. At this time all of the photos are currently organized by date which can be fairly daunting as you may know.

So basically this is two questions. What is a good program used to organize photos as well as what is a good way? date? style? type?

Right now I am using Adobe Bridge which is great but sort of slow and resource intensive.

[colourbox]

Personally, I organize by shoot in order of date. To find images, I use keywords.

Bridge is OK but you may need to also use something better like iView, Cumulus, or Portfolio.

If you are a pro or plan to take many photos, you can't take this chore lightly. The definitive book on the subject right now is Peter Krogh's The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers (http://www.thedambook.com/index.html). He has a forum (http://thedambook.com/smf/index.php).

[claudermilk]

The book is an excellent starting point. iView is one of the top DAM apps, though I personally prefer IMatch (Windows only, if that makes a difference to you). Eventually you'll need to come up with some kind of solution since the photo archive is only going to keep growing & the earlier it's done the easier it is (I waited 2 years too long :uhoh).