I just finished sorting out photos that I had in many different places on CD’s, DVD’s, my computer, Darya’s computer, mail. I used to think that we didn’t make enough photos. Well, I was wrong, we have quite a bit of them. 
It took me almost 3 hours to sort photos by categories so it doesn’t look like a mess anymore. It’s much more convenient to have them centralized. The next step would be to buy an external hard drive and store all photos, music and videos there.
Actually, I had a lot of fun watching through old photos. I’ll probably spend more time soon picking my favorites and uploading them to Picasa.
What did you use to sort them? Some software or you just arranged the image files on HD?
I have them all sorted on my HD chronologically. Every time I copy images from the camera to HD I make a new directory and name it in the following format:
YYYY.MM.DD.Event.Name
For example:
2007.08.30.My.Birthday
2008.01.01.New.Year
I was looking into all the software that helps you manage pictures, such as Picasa and iPhoto, and it seems to me that they are designed for people who like to dump all their images into a single folder and then need to create virtual folders. I don’t really seems to benefit from any of this. I keep thinking that maybe I’m missing some important concept there, but maybe I’m not?
I pretty much manually sorted all of them. The structure is like:
Odessa 2004-2006
Home
Friends
Band
…
US 2006-2008
Connecticut
Home
New York
…
And it’s a good thing when your photos are all devoted to some event, but in my case I had collections of photos that I have been taking during months and then downloading them to the computer. So obviously, they were all mixed together.
You’re right about picasa. But this is only the case when you already have a dump of photos and picasa finds them and doesn’t make any changes to folders structure. For the new photos, I usually use picasa and create album name (and picasa creates folder with the corresponding name).