So far I've been hand-coding my site, and I set up a pretty simple path structure. From the root domain, there are three main folders: Photos, Images, and Thumbs. The image folders have 135 files. I've been thinking about how much easier things would have been if I'd broken these up by the gallery each page fits into. So /Photos/WaterfallInYellowstone.html would become /Photos/Landscapes/WaterfallInYellowstone.html and /Photos/Daddys-Little-Girl.html might become /Photos/Portraits/Family/Daddys-Little-Girl.html.

I'm already ranking pretty well under a handful of regional terms for some of these pages. 301s will take care of the immediate traffic, but I would want to do it across the board, which seems like it would disrupt Google, Stumble, and other sites that send me traffic from a database. It'll take a lot of work, not all of the images fit into only one category, and eventually I'm planning to move to a CMS anyway, but it could be a while.

There reasons to change, and reasons to leave things as they are. But I'm ready to add a few pages, and need to come to a decision. Any advice? Or thoughts on how long it might take things to correct themselves?

Go with the folder structure that makes most sense from a maintenance point of view.

with a bit of htaccess and 404 page script magic it is possible to make UAs believe nothing has changed.

moving everythhing and setting up 301s can take several months for it to settle down.

I hope I'm being helpful here forest but in my experience working with galleries it's almost impossible to define some images so you end up with a "misc" folder anyway.

In place of trying to separate into folders, I usually choose a very rigid photo naming convention and it's easier to track things no matter where they are. Just a thought.

I must worn you I had a pr4 site and I decided to change the structure of my site and I dropped to a pr2 even though I tried using 301 redirects