On the server, by subject. Such as:

Vacation - Mexico
Vacation - Europe 2015
Vacation - Europe 2016
Christmas - 2002
Christmas - 2003
Road Trip - Colorado 2009
Road Trip - Colorado 2016
Birthday - Becky 39
Birthday - Robert 41
House - Bedroom Paint 2012

By year and then similar to how chloecat organizes hers within the years. As examples, I have a folder for house & garden photos, one for our family stuff (grandkids birthdays, special events, etc), one for each vacation, road trip, or whatever, a miscellaneous for odds and ends, and a household folder for files (tax stuff or other documents).

I take a lot of pictures - usually every day I'll take 50 to 100 or more. I organize them by folders which are titled by the date and subject (ex: East Coast Trail, Jan 30 or Sunset, Jan 28, etc.)

Then each month all photos are put into a folder just for that month.

All photos are backed up nightly to a personal server and one in California that we pay for.

^^^This. Backups are important. We do a weekly backup to an external hard drive that one of us takes to work (out of the house, for safety). And, like Casey, we have a cloud backup that we pay for.

Yes, I do this ^^^^the same way. I have thousands of photos and would never be able to find anything otherwise. I do one thing differently for the more than 100 y.o. family photos by giving digital copies to at least 10 family members to make sure they do not get lost to future generations.

I had been keeping mine in yearly folders with subfolders. This fit well with my old, early digital, Nikon camera. However, my newer digital Canon uses a different organization, I have it set to create a new folder every month. I, then, mirror the same on my hard drive when I copy the photos from the camera. The file structure on my hard drive matches that of the camera's storage card.

At a later time, I will add nomenclature to the computer file to identify a particular image to make it easy to find, but I do retain a trace to its original name that was created by the camera. For example, If the original file name was: IMG_0781.jpg and was an image Aunt Harriet A. Smith, I would edit the computer file name to: IMG_0781 Smith, Harriet A.jpg If I might have to interface with a media that does not allow commas in the file name, then I would edit the file name to change all commas to a dash (-) or underscore (_). The .jpg must remain as last characters of the file name. This signals various softwares what type file it is.

Does on the server, mean you download them to Pictures, on the computer? That is what I do, but I find the pictures in the folders too small. Clicking on each one to enlarge it is necessary for me.

Is there a program that can be installed for photos?

Casey - I enjoy seeing your beautiful pictures. At a lecture, a local photographer stated sometimes it takes him months and hundreds of shots to get that 'one.' He is very passionate and it's obvious you are as well. That certainly is a lot of pictures.

What is a personal server?

Prior to digital cameras, I took pics, which were developed, then stuffed in a shoebox. One year I resolved to mend my ways and bought various books and labeled 500+ pics with dates, names, events, I was soooo proud of myself and for a few years I kept it up.

then digital cameras came out and my pics are transferred to my computer, only organized by date. It is a daunting task to find anything quickly. I'm back to square one but instead of a shoebox, it's in the computer innards. I am NOT fixing that mess!

Bossy - That's what I'm facing - a daunting task. My goal is to tackle it, as a project, to combat the February blahs.

I take a lot of pictures, related to an interest I have, as a reference. Those have really gotten out hand. Many are very poor quality, but still useful to me.

Computer innards is my kind of language! At least I now what you mean.

After you sort your photos into folders, have you considered using photo organizing programs such as Faststone Viewer? Picaso has been discontinued but is still usable.

Mine are on my hard drive. I back the hd up ever so often. When I download my pictures they go in to monthly folders, which are divided in to daily folders (as I download pics).

Thus, it is easy to compare June 1 pictures of the same plant, over several years. :)

Moni

Thank you for the suggestions, everyone.

Elizabeth - An organizing program would probably be very useful. I'll look into Faststone Viewer.

As an experiment, I'm going to try putting some reference photos on PowerPoint.