I've got a bone to pick, and this is about as good a time as any (and it gives me a good excuse to use this nice photo Ed Zurga shot of me!). Does it ever seem that most people preaching workflow want to teach you the most complicated version they can come up with?

This hit me last week as I was going through a few blogs and web postings others have done on their "dream" workflows. To me they seem more of a nightmare. A workflow shouldn't be designed to justify your investment in time and money on software and hardware. It should simply be a system that makes sense to you, and lets you get your work done in an efficient manner.
Let's say you shoot photos of your family activities, picking up the camera a couple of times a week. Here's all you need to do:

1 - Download your photos now and then (doesn't have to be every day) to a folder on your computer. To make your life easy, put them inside your "Pictures" folder, and then inside a folder for that month ("April," for now, and you can put 01, 02, etc. in front of the months to make the list in order).
2 - Have your browser rename the photos by date shot and number sequentially ("20080406_0001.jpg" and so on).
3 - As the year progresses, have a folder titled "2008 Best" inside that 2008 folder, and copy your very best photos from each month to that.
4 - Have one more folder, in my case called "Reed's Best," and pick your absolute best photos from each year and copy them to that.
5 - Occasionally burn all your photos (you know, those monthly folders) to DVD for long-term storage. Keep only the "Best of" collections on your hard drive for immediate access (or on an external drive), and have those "Best of" collections burned to a second set of DVD's and stored away from your home (your office, your friend's house, a safe deposit box, etc.).

That's it, you're done. Shoot lots of photos? Then just use a year folder for everything, and instead of a folder for each month, have one for each day you shoot ("20080406").
Do you need a cataloging system? Probably not. As long as you don't need to track down images on a daily or weekly basis, you'll probably be able to find everything you need within a few minutes, based on those "Best of" collections. And if you do need to find images regularly, out of huge collections, then it's time to have a catalog, and build a more complicated workflow.