organizing digital photos

I have about 10,000 photos in my iPhoto program on my laptop. Many many many are duplicates - probably I downloaded them from my camera and just hit "all" each time without deleting from my camera often enough. Or something. Maybe they're breeding.

Anyway, too many photos, need to go through them and sort/weed out/organize and make print copies of some and send to others. And put some on DVDs.

It's so easy to have digital photos - even 10k of them - not like having to store "real" photos. That ease takes away the importance of them, though - I remember when the photo process was:

1. buy film in cute little canisters
2. load camera, make sure the end catches onto the roller
3. take photos, advance the film each time after you snap it
4. remove film from camera and put into cute little canisters
5. take film roll to photo store
6. wait 1-2 weeks for them to develop the film
7. eagerly look through the photos, throw out the bad ones, make copies of a couple to share with friends
8. keep out one or two to display at home on the wall or in albums
9. stash the rest in a box with the negatives

Wow, what a process! Now it's click, look at it, snap a dozen more of the same scene, download them all to the laptop and never look at most of them again.

I want to keep just the essential ones, one or two photos of an event, not 30 or 50. Ten-twenty of a vacation, not 200. Actually print some out, the others keep just as digital.

I'm not looking forward to it, and imagine it will take a long time. I have this irrational fear of discarding something I may want later (memory problems run in my family and having visual cues are important) - but I realize that 90% of what I have I just don't ever look at again.

Any suggestions? Has anyone else weeded out their digital photos like this? Thanks for any help.

~ juniper, photo hoarder ~

Oh thanks for those. I should have thought to look for something like that. So I can delete the duplicates, then I just have to decide which of the remaining ones I want to keep, and which I can get rid of. That may be the tough part.