The rule everything else follows from
One answer stated it plainly: you will not go back. Tagging feels like a chore at import and an impossibility six months later, when you no longer remember who was there or where it was. Everything else in the thread — which fields, which folders, which application — matters far less than whether the information is captured at the point where you still have it.
What to record
- People, which is the search almost everyone ends up wanting and the one that is hardest to reconstruct later.
- Location and event, which is also how several contributors structure their folders.
- Anything specific to your own work that you might search on one day — the accepted answer's framing is to tag what you think you will look for.
- Not the date. One answer pointed out that anything already in the file's own metadata is wasted effort to duplicate.
Folders and searches
- Folders by event or location were the common approach, with tags doing the finer work on top.
- Saved searches that update themselves as new material matches were singled out as more useful than manually maintained albums.
- The division that emerged: folders hold things once, tags let the same photograph belong to several groupings at the same time.
A caution about this thread
- It is from 2010 and most of the applications named in it have since been discontinued.
- The method survives the software, which is the reason to read it: tag on import, do not duplicate what the file already knows, and let searches do the sorting.
- Choosing a catalogue you can export from is worth more than choosing the best one, given how many of the ones recommended here no longer exist.