Since I started taking photos in earnest during travels in late 2004, I've collected around 120k photos. I don't really shoot very often, but when I do shoot, I take tons of photos. For example, on a 10 day trip to London, I took around 9,000 photos. I'm not a great photographer, but somewhere in that pile will be some great photos I'm pleased with.

I don't want to be stuck with one software's way of doing things, so here's how I organize them:

- Each trip is organized in a folder with a sortable date down to the month and general placename: "2014-05 London"

- Inside that folder, at the end of every day of shooting, I dump all the photos into a folder with the name of the day of the trip: Day1, Day2, etc. Sometimes I'll use the date for the day instead. It doesn't really matter much.

- Since during the course of a day, I might shoot at several locations, inside each "Day" folder, I organize the photos by location of the shoot or a short description of the event I was shooting, "Walking Around the Shard", "Tate Modern", "East Dulwich" etc.

- I also use a couple different cameras, so inside each of those, I have a folder for each camera: Nikon, Lumix, etc.

- Inside each of those I separate out pictures I took of my family or of me with pictures of sites. I usually upload the "personal" pictures to Google or Facebook so I can access them anywhere.

- So if I want pictures of us from Picadilly circus on the 3rd day of our trip to London (and not the 6th day when we went there again), I go to 2014-05 London/Day 3/Picadilly Circus/Nikon/Us

- If I want Pictures of Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa from the Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, I go to 2011-04 Italy/Day 5/Rome - Santa Maria della Vittoria/Canon

- In each of these, I make a folder called "top" where I copy the photos I think are the best. As I process the photos I make a final selection and put the results in a folder called "done".

- So the best, finished and processed, shots from my last example are 2011-04 Italy/Day 5/Rome - Santa Maria della Vittoria/Canon/top/done

out of maybe 200 photos total at that church, only 2 or 3 might make it to "done".

Even if I can't remember exactly which day I took a shot, the descriptive names are searchable in the file structure and I can usually find a specific photo in a few seconds. It's also self documenting so when I need to update my CV or remember when I took a trip somewhere, just navigating the file system provides all that information.

There's often 1 more step, an agency also buys some of my photos, and their acceptance process is even more stringent than mine, so out of 20 or 30 "done" photos, I might only get 6-10 accepted for professional publication. I put those in a "published" photo under "done".

I've started a new system as well. On January 1st, I take the previous year's photos and put them in a folder with that year. Only the current year's photos stay in my root photography folder. This makes things much tidier even if a little harder to find. So all of the above examples would have one more folder with just the 4 digit year before it.

I make a global backup of my entire collection after every trip or shoot onto a couple other disks, one of which stays disconnected most of the time and in a drawer.