well so far I've been doing them all just in groups for the folders like:
Year - Month (numeric) (month (full word)) - Country - Event
For my view scheme I then have:
hard disk Location (set to have root in my photo dir so that each 'logical' set of photo's appears as a group in MC (makes it easy to tag with))
Date Year
Country (eg. England)
Places (eg. London)
Events (eg. Justin Timberlake Concert, Wedding, Snowboarding)
People
Events and People are fast getting out of control and way too big - they desperately need grouping - fingers crossed for v10.
Using the first one (location on hard drive) I can easily tag groups of pictures FAST except for the people tag.
People is still a long painful process.
Whenever I've finally managed to get them all tagged though I'm then going to rename the files probably with:
Folder: Year - Month (Month Name) - Day - Country - Event
File: Track # (sort order for the pictures) - People
That should keep the file names pretty well organised for using that for keeping track of the images.
Putting year - month (numeric) first helps to organise the images well in explorer so they follow a logical heirarchy.
If you use a digital camera - one view scheme I made last week after trying Adobe Photoshop Album 2 which has a 'calendar' which shows all dates and highlights ones with pictures in - is: Year/Month/Day/Country/People/Places/Events
This one works GREAT for totally untagged and un-organised images as it'll break them up into when they were taken and obviously on holliday that will group them together with where you were - also works quite well for people as your normally only with certain people on specific days and they'll likely be in most of the photos from that day.
You'd have to have a pretty high resolution though to squeeze in that many fields - Even though day and year etc are small fields they still take up a lot of space.
The non tag saving inside images does suck but it saves them with jpeg which is what I mainly use. Also, I'm probably going to make a plugin to export all the data to an external file at some point as I dont want to take ANY chances with all that data - I'll make it export the tags to a file in each folder for that group of pictures.
I'm REALLY hoping MC will see support for jpeg2000 soon so I can start using that for my images.
Right now though jpeg works fine as it's what most cameras use on a low setting.
Also - remind me next week or something - I plan to try to make a plugin that'll do automatic backup's every so often for us for exactly the scenario you talk about - I always forget to back up.
Any images tips and tricks you have too would be welcomed.I'm trying to plan what I'm going to do thoroughly with this as it's 10,000 files all fully untagged - it's a lot of work and I wanna make sure I chose the best method/program etc so it's not wasted work due to the incompatibility of tagging between different programs.
My website creator plugin is my first step towards setting up MC for images