How do you organize your online picture storage?

I am looking for ideas to help me come up with a better way of organizing my online photo storage. I use smugmug.com and after getting over the noob learning curve have been pleased with it for some time and plan on staying there. I have stumbled along and find myself with an ad hoc cluttered filing system. I am curious how other Photography forum members deal with this issue.

I have collected a mass of pictures. They fall into a few categories:
ÔÇó Personal pictures of various topics
ÔÇó Production pictures for the Morning Reads. These are mainly the title pictures used as headers for the various sections. There are approximately 700 pictures in 8 files. For the most part this works for me.
ÔÇó Pictures published in the Morning reads. These are pictures that get included in articles and bike candy. Currently this is a single file and has over 1000 pictures.
ÔÇó BMW PressClub. These are photos provided for journalist use. There are perhaps 2000+ photos split between headings such as bike pictures filed by specific models, BMW Cages, MINIs, Rolls Royce Motorcars, Motorrad Motorsports, F1, BMW Motorsports, and when I am lazy or in a hurry they get dumped in a BMW PressClub file.

I am living in a new location and expect the personal/ride photos sections will grow at a greater rate as I ÔÇÿwonderÔÇÖ around and take pictures.

I am looking to you to find out how you organize your online photos, not for you to come in and organize my files. I have some different needs than many of you, and by nature I know I will figure out something that will work for my odd way of looking at things.

I feel your pain brother.

I use smugmug to share the"good" pictures with you-all and my actual relations which leaves me with a bunch still on my computer...

With smugmug, I try to catagorize by event but still have pile of "misc". With dozens of files at home, it can take a long time to find a specific picture if I don't remember exactly where it got stashed.

There's got to be a better way...

How do you organize your online picture storage?

Click to expand...

Organize? What organization?

Keywords or tags - what ever the application calls them is another way to go.

In Flickr I work at putting tags on my uploaded pics. The more I use my photos the more value I see from tagging. I can walk through a folder and add tags one by one, or I can use the "organize" feature to pull in specific sets of pics and add tags to those. More people, including me, can find the picture if it has enough tags on it.

Additionally Flickr does allow me to store the picture in multiple folders.

I now have tags that I had never thought of having when I first started uploading.

Click on this picture to see the associated tags
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/srab/584582202/" title="How much more rain? by sheridesabeemer, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1286/584582202_4d6b425003.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="How much more rain?" /></a>

bmwdean said:

Organize? What organization?

Click to expand...

I need to do a better job also.

It's easy on the Mac side of things with iPhoto. It's a database like iTunes. Instead of playlists, you can organize by folder. You can also publish folders to the web easily. I'm using Apple's dotmac service. When I make changes in iPhoto, the online versions change too. Here's an example of a published collection: http://gallery.mac.com/dayday#100007

I haven't used it, but I hear that Picasa has similar functionality, at least in some respects.