In reply to Only a hill:
> Maybe I ought to go through and do a cull...
I too catalogue my photos by year, event and date. Its a great way to put images into pigeon holes, never to see the light of day again on your monitor.
Have you ever considered tagging every single one of your images?
Even though I still habitually put my images into chronological order I have discovered that tagging every single one of my images with as many descriptive words has been the most productive way of finding long lost images. The more thorough you are the better the end result.
Now all I have to do is throw up a few descriptive words such as climbing, Yorkshire or any other combination of words and I am presented with wondrous sideshows to amuse myself. Or if I have a specific project in mind for relatives or friends, its a great way of drilling down through the digital coalface to find those pertinent images.
I've realised that tagging my images have given a new lease of life to my photos, which like your own, would never have seen the light of day.
it was a long process, taking a few years on and off to work through. I first began culling my 40,000+ images to get rid of the chaff before starting the whole process using the tagging feature of Lightroom.
Another excellent tagging feature is to get Windows own Windows Live Gallery to seek out every single face in your collection to be tagged. This is an excellent tool that learns to recognise faces and automatically tag them too.