My wife, Debra Ferguson, is a professional photographer who shoots nothing but digital. (She specializes in agriculture.)

She has been converting everything over to a program called iView. Microsoft bought it recently. She sent me a link to it on Amazon and said it looks like the price has gone down (maybe by half) since she bought it about 4 months ago.

There's also a book on the subject that she recommends:

It's called The DAM Book, Digital Asset Management for Photographers by Peter Krogh. Debra took a 3-hour course that Krogh gave.

This may be overkill for you, but a lot of professionals are moving toward iView and working on Krogh's suggestions regarding things like file names and such. One of the neat thing about iView is the way it can quickly set up pages for a web site as galleries. We've tried several programs to do this, including Photoshop and MS FrontPage, and iView does a better, more intuitive job than anything I've dealt with.

There's something of a learning curve, but if you end up with 10,000 images, it may be worth the trouble. A lot of this may also be geared toward people who shoot mostly in RAW and/or use Photoshop, but it's not completely dependent on either.

Trying to catalog digital images has been a booger bear for everyone who has gone digital.

May the force be with you.

Owen