I expect I am not alone in having a vast collection of reference images saved from around the internet. Mine is poorly organized, and I'm moving computers and trying to turn over a new leaf, as much as that's possible. I'm giving a program Sparkbox a try - it's an image library program with tagging and categorization options. Before I sink too many hours in to it, I figured I'd ask - how do you organize your reference stuff so it's easily accessible? Tell me about your systems!

Thanks for sharing the information about the Sparkbox
I keep my photos in one folder and it's a mess.

I have no order, just a heap of pictures on my poor desktop. Every so often I clear it off into folders marked by the year that I was interested in that particular style. Any better system is welcome. The only thing I like about my non-system is it gives me a time-line of my interests as they evolve and as I progress in my own skill level. Tags could go a long way to pulling that, and many other filters, together, though. Thanks for the heads up on a new system!

So far I'm liking Sparkbox. There's an "uncategorized" category where new stuff winds up, and as soon as I tag it it's pulled out of that (so no digging through reams of images to find the few that don't have any tags and are therefore unfindable). I've only pulled my vintage sewing patterns in so far, and I've got some 20 tags set up for them (year, part of clothing, publishing company, in-stash, to-sew), but it's working pretty well. Tags can be grouped but never duplicated, so I'm still thinking about how I want to organize everything before I really dig in to the big project - my historical reference stuff. It's easy to rename tags, though, so it's not the end of the world to change my mind later.

That sounds like an awesome program, but does anyone know of something similar for Windows?

I've transfered all my research photos to Pinterest boards. This was pretty easy as I had stored all the original link info in text files, so it was easy to just go through and transfer everything over in one fell swoop. You might try Google's Picassa for Windows, I think you can do tags in it.