How to Organize Photos?

Here's a question for the folks who have a zillion photos on their computer.

What's the easiest, fastest way to organize them? (I have Windows XP and Vista.)

My now-dead disk drive had a LOT more pictures than I thought. I spent hours last night moving all the photos into my Photo folder on my desktop.

Right now, I have them all parceled out into folders, though the organization is not uniform at all. Some pictures are in folders based on the year ("1987"). Some are in folders based on the topic ("Pets"), then usually separated into subtopics, sub-subtopics, and quite possibly even dates from there. Some are labeled based on where I got them from ("Scans," "From camera," "From phone," etc.). And there's also a giant "Misc" folder that has another kajillion pictures sort of randomly crammed in it.

It's hard to search for a particular photo. Some of the pictures are actually named based on the subject shown. Others are named based on the date the picture was taken. And the most recent pictures still bear their camera-imposed number.

My sister recommends dumping all my pictures into one folder and using Windows Photo Gallery (which comes with Vista) to slap tags on each picture.

Which is fine, but it's going to take a lot of time and effort. So I want to be sure that's the best thing to do, before I do it.

How do you organize your digital photos? Do you use a special program, and if so, which one?

Tell me your secrets, or the puppy gets it!!

Current Obsessions

For no particular reason, here are the things I'm completely obsessed with recently:

1. The smell of fresh garlic. Not the taste. Just the smell.
2. Mahjong Titans. So what if it's on my husband's fancy new computer? He'll never know I've been using his machine... unless he checks the high score list.
3. The song "Sweet Escape." Not obsessed in a good way - it's been stuck in my head for three days and I'm starting to lose my mind. Curse you, Stefani.
4. Japanese. Lately I've literally been craving the sound of this language the way people crave chocolate. Listening to J-pop helps obsession #4, but it only makes #3 worse. If you've ever listened to J-pop, you should know exactly what I mean.

Things I thought I would be obsessed about but I'm not:

1. Windows Vista. Pretty screensavers, pain-in-the-ass security. My husband can have it; I'll wait.
2. Tenacious D Movie. Haven't seen it yet and don't really feel the need to. I'm either less of a fan or more of a cheapskate than I thought.
3. Veronica Mars. A friend of mine insists I'd love the show. She even has a pit bull for a pal. But the name of this show turns me off. I keep thinking "Kim Possible." Blargh.
4. My new treadmill. Seemed like a convenient way to exercise, but it's pretty boring facing the wall for 30 minutes a day. I wonder if my husband would agree to wall-mount my computer in front of the 'mill?