Here's what we do. We have 120GB of photos from the last 4 years (when our first kid was born). They are in folders: - Year - Month (starting with #, ie

Here's what we do. We have 120GB of photos from the last 4 years (when our first kid was born). They are in folders: - Year - Month (starting with #, ie "5. May" - Outing (ie "Air & Space Museum") Photos that are just around the house are in the root of the month folder. This makes it easy to search for specific events and vacations (based on the descriptive "outing" folder name), but the weakness is that it's hard to find a particular 'round the house pic if we forget what month it was taken.