I used to sort all of my photos by subject matter before offloading them to CD. That became really painful, so I purchased IMatch. Now I just dump my photos to a CD, load them into the Imatch database as Unassigned, and then when I have time, I go through and assign them to subject categories. I might have 10 or more subject categories of photos on a particular CD.
For example, I do a lot of floral photography, so I have a category for each type of flower. I also assign photos to "color" categories where they are strong in one or two colors. The idea is that if I wanted to search for all "yellow" flowers - doesn't matter which type of flower, I'd be able to see them. I use the same concept for all other subjects too. For example - top level category: Vehicles, sub category - cars, motorcycles, bicycles, etc.
Within each subject category, I also have sub categories for raw, waiting for processing, finished, original jpgs. The idea is that if I'm looking for a "finished" photo so that I can print another copy, I go to the subject category, and then display the contents of the finished sub category. Works the same way if I'm looking for a new photo to process in a particular subject.
I have over 85 CDs so far in the database, and I must say that IMatch has saved me some time - no more searching for that one CD that has the photo. Now if I could only find some time to categorize all of my unassigned photos!!
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