So I got myself some new digital toys and have been dreading getting into Lightroom 4 before I figure this out... I'd like to come up with the best naming convention for all my image files (scans and digital) going forward. If I go another 30-50 years that's a lot of pictures, even if I only use film.

I did get the excellent Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow Handbook: A Guide to Staying Ahead of the Workflow Curve by Patricia Russotti and Richard Anderson.

Right now I am leaning towards using:

day month 4-digital year_camera or format name_sequence number.file suffix in lower case with no spaces, only underscores. Then keywording the descriptions for each set or session.

My hesitation over Lightroom is that once I get into that workflow, I don't want to try to change it around and mess up it's catalogs. Or is that a silly concern? Reading the easy start it seems like I want to point it to a folder and let it find new files on launch. I definitely don't want to get into a stupid iPhoto-like organization.....

Also, where and how should I store the raw files and scans? Right now I use folders organized by month, set into annual folders for raw images. Then I have another folder for final images, which get transfer to a giant image bank of edited finals organized by the person or subject's names. It is getting unwieldily.

Should I just go with a simple numerical naming system and rely on keywording going forward? I have 2TB of old stuff and I probably won't go back to redo it all.