Oh right, this must be an earlier submission than when we had discussed this.

Wow, I didn't know there was that much choice.
Whats best with thousands of files. See I was using picture programs to do management so I was just dumping pictures all into one folder which got to be too big that I can't even open that folder without Dolphin or Konq hanging for minutes.
So I've started moving pictures into subfolders, just putting the date and a brief description "2009 07 01 Anniversary" or such and dropping pictures into them to try and get the count down in the main Pictures folder. Most picture organizing don't really care about directories, they just tag. However I've changed OS's and programs sine I've started taking digital pictures so all those tags get lost whenever I try a new program. This led me to EXIF data and I've found I can embed tags and descriptions into those tags and other programs can import them, kphotoalbum for example. So by keeping the organization in the pictures its more portable. I just can't manage the large folder with thousands of pictures in it, this is where things are choking. I've had some success by using a script to read the actual date the picture was taken (from the exif), create a folder with that date then move the picture there and repeat. So i get a bunch of folders then go in each and preview and rename the folder to what the event was. But it takes a long time to render the previews, change the default sort from size as no matter what i do its defaulting the sort in every folder to size, seems to have gotten stuck there, go back up an rename.

Sounds like you need Picasa or digiKam.

http://picasa.google.com/linux/

http://www.digikam.org/

Have not used Picassa but can cofnirm that digikam deals very nicely with both "Albums" (= your own folder structure) and "Tags" (in Digikam's own database). In addition it will display all the EXIF data if you / your camera makes use of it.

Not sure how well it will deal with a single folder containing thousands of files, my collection is structured into albums (=folders) pretty well along the lines op suggested he was once using.

fm is pretty nice too in case you need a simple and fast application.

FWIW my choice when it comes to file managers is mc.

Greetz
For dealing with a file or two, or sometimes a batch, CLI is my tool of choice. That said, I distinctly recall the day I installed and ran PC Tools' PCShell on DOS 5 and it dropped my jaw. A good file manager is a "make it break it" deal for me. I may enjoy a particular DE/WM but I will drop it like a hot rock if the File Manager sux. I was at first disappointed that kfmclient was no longer the default in KDE but I have grown to appreciate Dolphin. However when I have
a lot of file work to do, Krusader just rulz, IMHO.

FileRunner , the one and only all time best

Here we have a versatile file manager, able to wash the dishes and the car and down the garbage too (but in the latter cases, only upon request). My wife call him Didier.

Bash. It keeps a record of everything I do. Other file managers do not.

I never bothered with a file manager until I started using KAudioCreator to rip my CD collection. The result was some extremely long directory and file names full of upper and lower case letters and backslashes followed by blanks. They sometimes had to be renamed because they contained characters, such as ':' and '?', that could not be copied to a fat32 partition. It was then that I discovered Thunar. It works pretty good.

Wow! It's fast alright! Nice little file manager!

Tried to build xfe, which requires fox-toolkit, but fox-toolkit wouldn't build and returned an error message than it (or something, sorry forgotten what) isn't compatible with the 'current' multilib versions of gcc.

I think that happened to me at one point in the past as well but the Slackbuild worked fine. Make sure you have ARCH set properly as well - in multilib it should still be x86_64
It's definitely a keeper, this file manager. The only thing missing for me is the ability to synchronize two directories (e.g., in dual-pane view), as Krusader does. emelFM2 is nice as well but more complicated to set up.

I mostly use zsh and dired (the extremely powerful file manager in emacs).

I use ranger (python-ranger) and I love it! There is no other fm which makes working so fast and comfotable.