Personally, organizing by foundry does me little good. When I’m looking for a font to use for a project I’m much more likely to think “what’s a good condensed sans serif?” than “I wonder if anything from H&FJ would work for this project”. I think you should consider your own criteria - I realize a lot of typophiles do organize by foundry. The only two foundries that I have “sets” for in my Font Explorer are House Industries and Emigre, both of which (to me) have a pretty distinct personality. Plus your themes can extended beyond serif and sans serif to categories that might work better for you.

Take a look at http://www.fontscape.com

Fontscape offers the time-honoured ’typographic’ classification scheme as well as many alternative schema, eg: appearance, application, mood, historical.

j a m e s

Organize by theme. Besides, you should be able to do a search by foundry if you know you want to stick to a specific one.

Definitely theme… Makes it that much easier in those “Hmm... I think a Garamond would look good - but which?!”-situations as well...

That fontscape link is actually pretty good, I was thinking about organising my fonts by Vox or some British classification system.

The font files are organized by foundry in my computer but in font explorer they are in sets organized by theme.

Organizing by foundry helps in some situations, but not ones directly related to selecting designs. If you’ve purchased/acquired fonts with varying licenses (e.g.: free fonts that are free for personal but not commercial use), the terms of the licenses might be a better search criteria. This will sometimes correlate to the foundry they come from, though not reliably so. Still, some foundries include a license brief in the copyright line (not a full EULA, just a statement) and this can be helpful.

Once upon a time I organized my fonts like Patty, but then Suitcase gagged and I lost it and I have yet to go back. Since that time I’ve organized by foundry. Why? Because foundries generally have a style and/or quality that represents the lot of their work. Jason’s mention of EULA also is important (to me).