LOL!
Well, seeing as we have revived this thread from the dead, let's pull the string a little bit.
Like most, my scheme have evolved over the years.
I've been shooting since '99.
Until 2006, my management scheme was, less than optimal. Grab some shots, read them into whatever storage media I had, if I was really diligent, I burned a CD (to tell you how long ago this was)
On August 29, 2005 my home town of New Orleans was visited by an evil witch named Katrina. In preparation of bugging out for the storm, I had plugged a USB storage drive (a full sized 5 1/4" HDD in a case) and ran xcopy mirror to download my images from the SCSI mirrored drive pair in the server onto the USB. We threw everything in the car and drove to Houston.
After we were settled in the hotel room, I plugged the USB drive into my laptop and it was empty. NADA, zilch, zippo. In my horror I realized I had mirrored an empty drive onto the drive in my computer, thus wiping out all the files on that machine. Oi....
As you might expect, the computer in question was a tower system and was on the floor of the house. When the call came from a friend that my house had been the recipient 10 1/2" of nasty, dirty brackish water courtesy of Katrina, I really began to get worried.
After the ok was given to return to the area, my family and I drove back to the house. It was s surreal situation with a thin later of dirt left by the receding flood waters covering the floor. It was a slab house and we had a floor outlet in the living room that was still full of water. By the time we had gotten back, the power had been restored, so the entire ground floor of the house was "energized". Luckily I realized this before walking in. The breaker was near the outside door, so I tripped the mains and then was able to enter the house.
The house was a mess, but the first thing I wanted to do was check my server. Yep, water mark halfway up the side of the case. Yep, drives mounted in the bottom of the case.
Opening up the case, it as full of dirt, but a lot of the metal had been eaten away by whatever lovely stuff was in the water. I pulled out the 2 Maxtor drives and the SCSI card. and threw the remainder away,
I've spent my entire professional career in the Offshore Oil and Gas ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) business, so I knew exactly what to do with electronics that had been flooded. WD-40 to the rescue. WD-40 is what we always used to clean off contaminaed PCB's and such after a sea water intrusion.
Everything was thoroughly cleaned up, dried and thrown in a large ziplock bag with a large bag of desiccant. I didn't have time to worry about the files, other matters were more pressing....
Many months later, I was talking with our corporate IT lady about the subject and she volunteered the usage of a derelict desktop she had to see if the files were recoverable. So I brought the drives and card in, plugged them into the box, downloaded the drivers for the SCSI card and everything booted up. The drives, after having been underwater for over a hour fired right up.
Using recuva, I managed to restore virtually every file that had been deleted. Some 15,000 worth. It took a couple of days, but there were less than 100 that were not salvageable.
I was so gobsmacked I sent Maxtor an e-mail about it whole affair. They offered to replace the drives with new versions if I would send them the old one as they wanted to examine them.
Once the house was rehabbed, we were able to sell it and a job opportunity arose in Northern Virginia where we currently reside.
After moving in to a rental townhouse, the first thing I did was buy an Infrant ReadyNAS to store my imagery on. The main reason for this particular unit was it was small and had a handle on the front. If we needed to bug out again, just shut the thing down and take it with you. Scar tissue if you will. The likelihood of mass flooding in Northern VA was miniscule, but I was prepared.
Sitting down, I began the thought process of how to store the files. I could go into great detail, but a picture is worth 1000 words as they say. This is a screen grab of my folder/file layout:
Join to see EXIF info for this image (if available)
I've gone through a myriad of DAM app's since those days. I started with iMatch, which was very powerful, but way too user hostile. I migrated to iView MediaPro, which worked pretty well until deprecated by my "friends" at Phase One.
Eventually I bought a copy of LR5 and upgraded to LR6.
In each of these, I set up ingestion schemes to automate much of the file handling as possible. I still use LR6 for my DAM as it supports all three of my cameras. It's not entirely automated though.
I'll insert the SD card, and fire up LR. I'll do an import into a folder YEAR/Date format which is created by LR. Once all the files have been ingested, I'll assign the appropriate metadata, most importantly providing a caption. As I shoot raw/jpg pairs (don't ask me why, I really couldn't tell you), I use the filter to select raw first and then tap F2 to rename them, followed by the jpg's. Once LR is finished creating previews and stuff, I'll rename the folder with the caption as you see above.
Letting LR write all the appropriate info to xmp files and the catalog, I'm done ingesting. Now that I'm no longer gainfully employed, I'll play with writing a LUA script to automate all this.
Following that, we have a trip to Capture One for postprocessing.
That's my workflow!
For others, there is a lot of good workflow info, most written by Peter Krogh, here:
File Management | dpBestflow
cheers