Help me consolidate, organize, and better manage my photos!

Metadata is fine and dandy provided you have an interface that understands how to read and query that metadata. Usually this means you either you go whole-hog and invest time/energy into a specific vendor's "workflow" (Picassa, Lightroom, etc.) or you go the opposite route and find the greatest common factor. In the case of images, that means metadata goes in directory names. The next question then is how can I most rapidly scan a potentially vast number of folders? I usually name folders by date (Year-Month-Day) and brief event description, (comma) location. So…2011-03-25 - Silly Cats, Portland, MEIf you want to correlate images by tags or group them by longitude and latitude or any of that fancy stuff, this probably isn't the answer for you. But if you basically just want to store the images in a rapidly-accessible, limitless structure that (and here's the important thing) works everywhere, then you might want to try my lo-fi route.

Irfanview is a well known photo/image management program, it's free and very powerful at doing batch conversion/renames. I just looked and one of the options in the Batch Rename supports EXIF, though I haven't used it myself (click File - Batch Conversion/Rename - Options Button for Batch Rename Settings - Help Button, look for $Ex for EXIF tagging inside file name, but you need to use the EXIF plug in). I found a http://en.irfanview-forum.de/vb/showthread.php?1435-Renaming-by-EXIF-Information on the topic. Also the CNET page for Irfanview (download/reviews) is http://download.cnet.com/IrfanView/3000-2192_4-10021962.html and here's a link for http://www.irfanview.com/plugins.htm. Another feature of Irfanview that I absolutely love and that helps me a LOT with my photo organization is the Move/Copy feature. Use the left/right arrow keys to navigate through the images in a folder and then use F7 to bring up a dialog with up to 14 target directories to Move the file to. F8 is the same idea but for Copy and a separate set of target directories. You can get quite good at remembering what folder is what number, and just click F7 then 1 or F7 and 5, etc. Once you do a coarse move of your files into general categories, you can then revisit those 14 major folders and start breaking them down further. The quick movement through the directory combined with the quick F7 key and folder number can go a lot faster than it sounds. Note...for the above to work go into Irfanview Options - Properties/Settings - Extensions and click the Images Only button and click the "Load only associated types while moving through directory" radio button.