Organising photo folders - Help!

[Gundus]

I'm an analogue shooter, but need some advice in organizing my structure of photo folders after the scan!
How guy's do it? By year? Subject? Month? sub-folders....

Thank you in advance

[Jim Jones]

If you file by date, you may eventually need a catalog by subject so you can find photos. This may be the best system, as one photo may be cataloged under more than one topic. Searching the catalog with a word processor is one quick way to find all images of one subject. Some files that are likely to be accessed often are duplicated and filed by subject. Sub-folders are also used for these. My relatively few files that are edited and sized for printing are filed by print size. This might not work for someone who has hundreds of images worth printing.

[kgm]

I'm in the process of scanning and organizing thirty years worth of negatives and transparencies. I set up folders according to the location of the photo, but I have separate folders for each film format (when I'm looking for a photo, it's easier for me to look through the 35mm or 4x5 separately, since I know the format that I took it in), and each format separated into B&W, color negative, and transparency. For location, I separate by country (easy since I haven't done much international travel), with subfolders for state or province, then city or county. The exception is for National Parks, Monuments, Lakeshores, etc. They get their own folder, with subfolders for each park, monument, etc.
To make this clearer (well, maybe not), my hierarchy is three folders at the top for B&W, color negative, and transparency, and under those subfolders for each format (110, 35mm, medium format, 4x5, and 8x10), and then location subfolders within each of those. It sounds complicated, but it's much easier for me to find specific photos this way. Since I have several formats to organize, it seems to me that it would be more difficult if I had the location folders at the top and then had to break them down into format and film type subfolders, but maybe that's just me. When I'm looking for a specific photo, I always have the format and film type in mind.
I have the date information in logs that I keep for each photo, and I can look that up pretty easily. I probably should just add that to the caption for each photo, but it hasn't really been a problem for me so far to look it up.