What naming scheme is the best?

Question

I've imported photos from a hard drive into Aperture. The folders were listed as years. Then with folders of events within each.
On import to Aperture I have ie: 1999 as project. Within this I have many folders such as Fishing, XX birthday, XX birthday, Fun Park, Christmas, etc...
Then another Project 2000 and same as above.
Is there a better naming scheme I should use? In each year Project folder I have Christmas photos. Paintball tournaments. Family get togethers etc..
Some events the same just different years.
Is there a more efficient use of Apeture? Such as making a Christmas Project and then putting all Christmas photos in here? Should I then make year folders of the tournaments or for Christmas?
Not sure of the best use of Aperture to control photos?

Answer 1

For me the best thing is a unique name for every image. I had considered a date naming convention and did not go forward for a few reasons, first off the name was getting too long and I could always look for the date by metadata, so no need.
I figured naming by content presented problems such as what content if an image of a dog also has a cat in it? Skiing in Alta? Skiing or Alta.... Then there is the problem of remembering or finding the last numbered image in the group.
So I ended up with a simple sequence number. I was originally going to go with using letters for the beginning to coincide with a year. A=2001, B=2002 etc. I again threw this out as being redundant because of Metadata. I ended up just going with a letter first with 5 digits following. I edit down to keepers and then simply go back and see the last number I used and then use the following number.
In Aperture I place the images in projects of the shoot in folders of the client then in projects within those folders. I then put alias's in a sequentially numbered folder in groups of 1000.