I also was a victim of my own making. Thousands of photos and no rhyme or reason to them. I would not say I am cured but certainly reformed. I used the following method to help me sort through the sea of bad to get the gold.

1.all photos imported with date as folder name.

2.Since I shoot in raw I have an extra step once my post work is done, I have to save the master and then save again as a Jpeg.(I only do this for the stuff I am looking at presenting.

3.When I look through the batch the first time I pull out the keeprs and move them to a folder called Best of..(2012 or whatever the year may be)

4. After the post is done I save the master back to the 'best of' folder and then the jpeg to a subfolder called 'web ready'.

5.Once I have uploaded I move the file to another subfolder called 'posted to renderosity' This way I know that if there is a file in web ready, I have not yet uploaded it.

When I feel nostalgic or want to find something new to work on I can just go back through the dated folders and pick a time of year that I think might hold an interesting hidden gem. It isn't perfect but it has helped me sort out the mess.

As for all of the saving of same but different files, by shotting in raw(for Nikon) I can edit and save as many versions as I want inside of the one raw file. This way there is only one file with multiple versions of the same picture.