If you're losing the fight to keep your growing image archive under control, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of Peter Krogh's The DAM Book: Digital Asset Managemet for Photographers. It's well written and places a lot of disparate information about organizing and maintaining your image library all into one place.

Although it is a very good book about this subject, it worth saying that is geared towards iview media pro (now sold by microsoft under the name of media expression) and adobe bridge.

True enough, but the general principles set out can be adapted. One should remember that it is hard to discuss these matters in the abstract; one needs to give examples, and once one starts giving examples, it is much easier to spell them out if one uses particular software.