[Zig]

Neat thread.
My most important bit is waiting for a couple of weeks after shooting, then pruning hard and deleting anything that's half-decent: it's then easy to blat anything that's out-and-out tripe and bin that too. I save as 16-bit tiffs any images I count as exceptional, I save only websized(780pixel) jpegs of everything else, keeping the raws, on the grounds that I can work out how to re-pp the image again if it's good enough to get into print or in a frame.
Tiffs, jpegs and raws just live in a folder that has a memory-aid title and the month; the month folders then get put into a year folder, and I'll bang that into my storage drive and a copy to an external drive.
My "Image Drive" on my primary HD is only purposefully a partition of 17GB or so: it helps me clear out ruthlessly and often, making me have to do a sort out and backup every month or so! It's also darn easy to de-frag, as I find image files get fragmented really quickly.
I often find I've deleted some really good images by these methods: I quite like that feeling, as it trains me mentally to "let go" and shoot better next time..If I were a magpie, I'd have a big pile of rubbish and I'd get used to keeping stuff that's not my best.
I'm certainly quite spartan and ascetic, as I find it keeps me "fitter" photographically.