Personaly I have set up mc to work like this:
I have made fields: [country] [area] [places] [people] [trips][events] plus one for [subject] which has "people" "places" & "textures" as its' selectable fields.
My main view scheme, the images root one, has a pane for each of those fields and I use it to tag all my images.
Then I have a view scheme for "Places" "People" and "Events" which basically has fewer panes in it and they are arranged in different ways for easier viewing of that particular subject.
I also made a field called [quality] with values of "good" "reasonable" and "poor" and put it as the first and final panes in the view scheme so that i could filter out just the best photos at any point. But recently I've been moving towards using the ratings instead.
Where they are on the hd doesnt make much of a difference to me cos i only browse them in media center really. but my way is to name them starting with "subject" then "country" then "place" then "quality"
The result of this is that the [subject] field tends to split up the photos taken in the same place a bit (ie: a person is the main part of one photo but then the mountains are the subject in the next, but with my view schemes and folder naming method these photos get split up a bit). So I have also started using the "album" tag and made a special "photo album" view scheme, just for viewing all the good photos taken at one time or in one place. And I name the albums myself, not using the auto date entry and make some interesting mix albums. Might be worth making a new "album" field that is semicolon delimited just so that a photo can be put into multiple albums.
And finally, i also seperate photos aquired from other places (downloaded or from other peoples cameras etc) so that they dont 'pollute'
my own collection.
Bri