More efficient image management?

My site will be all about image presentation. Not blogs. Not posts. Not comments. Not whatever. Users drill down to view images. Which means I need to MANAGE images, so I’m looking for advice on an efficient, scalable workflow.
Media manager displays all my images in one big bunch. As near as I can tell, it doesn’t distinguish between the USE for which I uploaded the images. For example:
I upload square image “A” 250px x 250px for use on the home page for the user to click to start drilling down. This upload happened IN the media manager and the image gets used later on the home page.
I may ALSO upload the same image “A” in a completely different aspect ratio – say 1280px x 960px for display in a gallery. THIS upload was done as part of creating the gallery, NOT from within the media manager.
And I may later use image “A” in a slideshow.

There may easily be 1000+ images when I’m done.

As I experiment, I try different gallery tools and/or different slideshow tools – some will let me select images from media, some force me to upload images. Which means not only do I have a bunch of images, but I seem to have an image “A”, and an “A-1” and “A-2” and so on. And they ALL show up on the single media page, so when I try to select a bunch to use, I can easily get multiple copies of the same image.
Same thing for the slideshow – some slideshow tools don’t do a good job of scaling to fit in the box, so I have to upload the images in an aspect ratio that WILL. Which means I have MORE images of “A” that are specific to the slideshow and shouldn’t be used in the gallery.
And on and on.

I installed Media Library + to help, but although it lets me create subfolders and move images into them, nothing else I’ve found VIEWS the images that way. So even though the slideshow images may be in their own folder, the gallery tool (and everything else it seems) STILL see one big folder with everything…

I’m currently trying various free media manager to see if one will help, but so far nothing really useful…

[Update]As I’ve been sitting here trying to manage images I think the two places I’m having the most trouble at the moment are being able to upload images to a specific folder – say slideshow – whether I’m doing the upload in Media or from the slideshow plugin (which still seems to use media manager), and being able to VIEW specific folders from whatever tool or plugin I’m using so I can get images from them. I’m sure there’s other stuff causing problems, but those two come to mind very quickly.

So, can y’all who have been here provide some guidance on how to see and select and organize images to make life in WP easier?