Lightroom: Makes No Sense to Me

I do not understand the people that organizes their photos by year and month.

Where are the photos of my daughter's new dog at the dinner with the kids. Is it 2009, 2010, or… What about the month? I'm sure that it was in the spring, so it could be March, April, or May, or it could even be in June. Which year again?

Did I take this photograph in March or in April? How do I know?

The problem is that I don't know. If my life depended on it, I would come up with a year and month and I would be 99.999% wrong. I know the day, the month and the year of when I got married (I'm not completely dumb, it's called survival), but I only know that my daughter graduated from university in June. Which year was it? I don't know, but I can search in Lightroom for her name and university.

I regularly go to the same place to make photos and have been doing for years. I have thousands upon thousands of photos spanning years, like http://photos.foto-biz.com/Animals/Downtown-Eastside/.

That's why there is Lightroom, good keywording… The problem is: How good is your keywording? And what about the catalog crashing, the backups… For me, I write all the XMP data, so if I need to reimport everything, which I already happened to me about a year and half ago, all is not lost.

• I keep all the imported photos in a directory: “Library”, making easy and simple to copy, to backup, to move…
• I only have 10 folders/directories as my major categories.
• Notice that I do not have a customers folder. The customers' photographs are in the regular categories but identified by the customer name, the date of the photo session and the photo number from the camera: customer-name-YYYYMMDD-9999.cr2, .tiff, .jpg, .psd and tagged in the catalog with the category: “Customer” and the keyword “their name.”