What is the best way to Organize MP3s, Photos and Videos?

Do you just use a standard directory structure? Do you use tools to help rename/move files?

Solution 1:

I use MediaMonkey to manage my files, and I am very happy with it.

As far as videos, I take advantage of the folder views and thumbnails to make my folders nice to look at:

A cool trick I only recently learned is that you can just name the image you want to show in the folder "folder.jpg" and it will be automatically used as the thumbnail. This is particularly handy.

Solution 2:

For music, I like the convenience afforded by dedicated apps. It's fine organizing everything yourself at first, but once your collection is reasonably large, it becomes a pain. Personally, I like iTunes for music organization. Yes, it's a bit bloated, but it runs reasonably well on a decent system and the memory usage is a small price to pay for the convenience.

I'm not a serious photographer, so I currently organize the few photos I have myself. I have heard great things about the new iPhoto and also know some happy Picasa users.