I've recently been thinking about ways to improve the organizational hierarchy of my photos. Specifically, I'd like to change the way photo albums are organized. A number of my albums fall into certain categories: state parks, festivals, zoos & museums, etc. As such, a categorical hierarchy could be very useful. One of my personal goals is to photograph every state park in North Carolina, and having a way of grouping those photo albums together would be terrific.

Two potential implementations for this occur to me. First, and most obviously, I could have a list of categories into which I assign each photo album (similar to the way blog posts are categorized in WordPress). Second is a "tagging" idea, where I simply add the appropriate tags to each photo album, then provide a mechanism to see albums with a given tag. Other solutions undoubtedly exist, and if you have an idea, let me know.

Changing the organization would most likely result in a rewrite of the main photography page. If I go with categories, I may have a page where the newest X photo albums would be shown, along with a few favorite images (that feature would stay), followed by the listing of available categories, rather than a listing of older albums. Perhaps a secondary page would allow you to view all old albums together.

How does that sound? Are there other ways that occur to you for organizing albums? How do you organize your personal collections? Sound off in the comments ... I'd love to hear your thoughts.