I'm a bit different in that a significant part of my income is from professional photography. Here's how I'm organized: Each year has a folder: YYYY. Inside th

I'm a bit different in that a significant part of my income is from professional photography. Here's how I'm organized: Each year has a folder: YYYY. Inside that folder is an Aperture library per category (e.g., Weddings, Portraits, Personal, etc.) Inside each Aperture library there are projects for each grouping of photos (e.g., Valley of Fire). Every file has a unique name that includes the date photographed and the frame number. I do allow Aperture to keep the image files internally because it simplifies backups. Aperture does not support XMP sidecar files like Lightroom and others do, so the only benefit I feel I'm losing out on by not storing them separately is having a file structure that matches the library structure. The libraries themselves are OS X packages, so it is possible to extract the files relatively easily if I'm no longer able to open Aperture in the future. I also do not care to have most photos on multiple devices. I have the ability to remote into the computer with the photos from anywhere I have an internet connection, so I'm able to grab a file if needed. With multiple terabytes of photos it's impractical to make them universally available to all of my devices anyway.