I use a phone to take photos now, and I use MC to "acquire" them (in the Action Window). I have MC put them in a directory for the current year.
I then tag them, using genre and sometimes comment or people or place, etc.
In the past, I used to then use MC's tool called Rename, Move, Copy to move them to directories that corresponded to my tags. For the last couple of years, I haven't done that because MC is really good at displaying what I want, so I almost never use Windows Explorer to look at them. It doesn't matter where they are stored.
If you get the information into the tags, it's really easy to search for what you want.