What I do with lots of photos

I have a lot of family photos and scans that I've taken over the years.   My current problem is that I keep a couple backups all over the place and a couple times I've tried different methods of storing the photos to make it easier to find a particular photo.

First I tried the old store by year.   This wasn't bad when I wasn't taking too many shots but as time went along, and I had a kid,  I had to change to year and month.

Something like

2005
    01 - Jan
    02 - Feb

The reason for the 01, 02 is to keep the order correct in Finder/Explorer.

This of course made it a pain when I sports and trips came along,  so I changed to an event based folder lay out.

Soccer
    2005 - name of team
    2006 - name of team
Trips
   2005 - where I went
   2006 - where I went

NOTE:   All of this was before iPhoto started doing events, etc.

Also I do not want to have iPhono or Aperture or Adobe controlling where my images are stored.

That got messy since there were a lot of miscellaneous image that didn't fit the layout or didn't really have that many images.

In the middle of all of this I'm making copies of copies of copies of the photos so that I don't lose any.

Well,  that brings me to my next problem.   Dups,  lots and lots of dups.

I wrote a quick Perl script to find the files with the same name but that failed since as I purchased new cameras I ended up with name overlaps (another issue brought up when trying to put all the files in one directory.

I'm now testing an interesting OS X application called PhotoSweeper.   It will go and compare images and makes it easy to cleanup my photo tree.

Link:  http://overmacs.com/photosweeper/

So far it's working well.   I've been using the default settings and have found thousands of dups from when I just grabbed everything and dropped them into a single directory tree.

My latest attempt is to do the following:

1:  Store by year

i.e.
   2012

2:  Sub-store but sport/event OR month for the stuff that's not fitting into a sport or major event.

   2001
        2012-01 Jan
        2012-02 Feb
        2012  XC
        2012  Skiing
        2012  Trips

3:  For each sport/event I'll group by what the event is:


   2001
        2012-01 Jan
        2012-02 Feb
        2012  XC
              2012-10-05  race name
        2012  Skiing
              2012 Alpine
              2012 Nordic
        2012  Trips
              2012-10-01 Yosemite Trip

This should make for a bit more manageable photo library.

NOTE:  by storing by year I can archive past years off to other media as needed.