Migration

I have made the decision to migrate all of my digital images to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (which I also intend to use as my primary editor). At first, the image library may only consists of things I'm actually working on (as opposed to every single shot of Christmas and birthdays and school events, etc.), but ultimately I want to get every picture I take or have taken into Lightroom to catalog and apply metadata/tags so that it's very searchable.

When I ordered LR, I also ordered Scott Kelby's book, Lightroom 2.0 Book for Digital Photographers and The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers by Martin Evening. I cracked Kelby's book last night, and the first chapter is about importing your images into LR and how to name them and apply metadata. He urges you to do this before you ever edit an image in LR. I can't really wait to learn the imaging tools, so I may not wait that long, but I'm now in the position to organize everything I have, including those film pictures that Wal-Mart would put on CD for me back when I was shooting film.

The problem is selecting a naming convention. I think I'm going to organize by year shot, then by month shot, and then by file number. So, a picture shot on January 3, 2009, would be filed in the January folder under the 2009 folder, and the file name would look something like 2009-01-03_DCIMxxxx (where xxxx represents the actual number of the picture). I'll then add metadata or tags so that they are searchable. I'm really struggling with this. I tend to organize by event (e.g., All That Dance->2008>Recital) or in the case of the few portrait shoots I do, by family (e.g., Parks Family->Fall 2008), and then the file numbers just retain their original names. Some of you (like Mendy) are far more organized than I am and have probably already either tackled this problem, or don't have to worry about it because you devised a file-naming convention right out of the gate.

So help me out. How do you organize your piles of digital images?