Organizing Your Images
No matter which method you use to transfer images to your computer, if you're managing your image organization yourself (as opposed to having a program like iPhoto, Aperture, or Lightroom do it for you), then you will want to think about how to organize your files.
You'll be best-served in your organizational chores by making good use of folders. How to organize these folders is entirely a matter of personal preference—just find a scheme that makes sense to you. You can create folders by subject—"Arizona vacation," "Winter holidays," "Family reunion"—or by date. You'll probably find that some combination of both works best, especially if you find yourself shooting a lot of similar events.
As you accumulate more vacation folders, you can group these together into other folders. With well-named folders, you can easily rearrange your taxonomy later, creating new branches of your naming "tree" and then rearranging photos as needed.
What you probably won't need to do is rename files. Yes, the images that come out of your camera have pretty meaningless names, but with a browser program such as the one that came with your camera, or programs such as Adobe Bridge or Camera Bits Photo Mechanic, you can search and sort your images by viewing thumbnails, rather than by digging through lists of arcane filenames.
If you do feel compelled to rename your images, renaming by hand is probably not the way to go, unless you're talking about only a handful of images. Programs like ...