With digital stuff, I tend to sort based on category:

• friends & family
• work
• party/holiday/birthday
• vacation
• dog
• fun stuff

I have more categories in some other areas of my life, these basically apply to nearly all areas, nearly all the time. If I don’t use it, I’ll just not use it.

The problem with digital photos: I have many, I want them sorted in various way, cause I want to use the digital aspect, I want photos sorted into birthday and family and dog at the same time. With my computer I should be able to find a photo easily if I type ‘sister birthday’. That searchstring should just give me all the birthdayphotos of all my sisters.

Except it doesn’t, because until recently ‘tagging’ didn’t really happen on my computer. Not that I didn’t want to, I just couldn’t find a way to do it in a way that came natural to me.

Yesterday, I realized my good old print system would work quite well for my basic digital sorting, as a start.

I created a tree-structure looking like this:

• 2005
• 02_zoo
• 03_momsbirthday
• 06_eurotrip
• 2006
• 03_puppy
• 05_Rome

Basically, I go for $year, and then for $month_$event. The files inside the directories I have renamed to $mm_$dd_$event_$number.jpg (month and date based on EXIF data).

I then created the basic category, along side the yearfolders, but also with years as subfolders, so I get this:

• friends & family
• 2005
• 2006
• work
• 2005
• 2006
• party/holiday/birthday
• vacation
• 2005
• 2006
• dog
• 2005
• 2006
• fun stuff
• 2005
• 2006
• 2005
• 2006

Any image of an event I bump into that falls into one of the categories (99% of the photos covered), I’ll put in these folder by creating an alias (symlink) of the original photo and move it to the sub-yearfolder. This way, one photo can go in multiple categories and I’ll never have to do funky stuff to open it, opening the link leads to opening of the file.