Digital Photo Organization tips?

I have a huge and growing collection of digital photos and am looking for an efficient way of organizing them.

My current process looks something like this:

After every photo session, dump all photos to a folder named “dd mmm yyyy – session description”.
... Example “20 Feb 2010 – Moon Shots in Atlanta”

This folder sits in a larger folder named “My Photos 2010 Part 2”

Each year is divided into multiple such “parts” in an arbitrary manner – each part roughly corresponding to one DVD (~4.7 GB) worth of photos.

All these photo folders sit in a portable hard-disk that I use as my master personal storage. Also, each “part” is burned to a DVD, labeled with the part name and the folder name on HDD is suffixed with ”- DVD WRITTEN” to denote whatever folder has already been backed up to DVDs.

I tried creating a MS Excel based catalog of all such disks but unable to keep it up to date.

Now this method is not flawless, there are huge gaps in between photo sessions, and some time delays before I download the photos, etc.

It is quite difficult to keep this process flowing smoothly.

It takes too much of effort everytime i sit to organize this stuff…. and still i do not have the peace of mind that I have organized all of my photos correctly without missing any of them.

Any suggestions to help me handle this better?