How do you manage your photos?

All this while i have been using My Pictures for viewing photos and keep photos according to date. Last time when im using a 4mp digicam with 128mb sdcard, i do not worry about keep file size in my pc.

Now that I'm using a dslr with 10mp and 4GB of sdcard and shooting 3-4frames persec.... im beginning to concern bout how to manage my photos in my pc.

This cny trip, i have come back with 500++ photos (near 4gb), within the 500 pic.. there are bad photos and good photos. some bad photos are shoot and kept to keep as record for the traveling- these will later been reduce to smaller size to save space.

There are some good photos, or more artistic approach type of photos...that I will keep in original size.

Now my question is... I would like to view photos these way:

1. ALL... 500 photos together ..good & bad photos in folder according to date
2. Viewing photos that is my "FAVOURITE" only from the 500 photos

Is there any way to "Favourite" selected photos just like how we group our songs in Mediaplayer according to Favourites?

pls share ur way of manage thousands of photos..

I use Adobe Lightroom to manage my photos. Although it doesn't really does the full job of sorting it out but I use it as part of my workflow.

You can use Lightroom to tag your photos either by colour codes or by star ratings (1 star to 5 star). So if you have 500 5 star photo very easy to just sort them out.

I have a dedicated partition for my photos. The partition separates into several folders. The folders will tell me what is it related to and one of the folder is a common folder for photos that do not fall into any of the other categories. In those folder, I make folders labeled with date/event name. I do not rate my photos.

I keep all my unprocessed photos in storage drive (partitioned drive). Sorted them by storing in several folders such as: Camera model - Year - Month - Events(if there's any). For my favorites photos, normally I'll resize them and keep them in favorite folder. Thus it's easier for me to upload those resized photos to the internet and faster viewing too.

i use picasa to manage my photos. photoshop cs2 and adobe lightroom for post processing.

iphoto for my edited jpegs.
raws are stored into my external hdd by date and event.

which is better to u?
picasa or adobe lightroom?
i using picasa right now.. but im thinking of changing to lightroom..
but i need some endorsement from u guys..

lightroom is kinda resource hungry. It's slow on my 2gb ram com. Picasa is simple an easier to edit but lightroom gives you more options. For me it's picasa, or GIMP, faststoneviewer for cropping. Lightroom is just slow.

ouh.. thx for the reply..
so no lightroom for me as im only using 2gb ram in my lappie..

Yup totally agree that Lightroom is resource hungry. Running 2.13Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2Gb of ram and it still eats up the processor and RAM.