The first step to using your pics, in any way, for any purpose, is to have them well organized on your computer. Get them off of the memory cards and onto your hard drive, and come up with a folder structure, and a naming convention, that will allow you to find specific photos when you want them. Make sure your naming system and folder structure leave plenty of room for expansion.
My folder system is strictly chronological. I have a folder for each year. Under those folders, I have a folder for each day I take photos; each year will have a maximum of 365 subfolders. If you take pics every day, you can add in subfolders for each month, so you won't have so many Daily folders in the list when you're looking at your pics. Example: Today's pics would be stored under My Photos\2012\2012-10-03\ If I were to add month folders, it would look like this: My Photos\2012\10-October\2012-10-03\
My pics are named simply, with the date, an underscore, and a 3-digit number. Example: the first pic I take today would be called 2012-10-03_001.jpg.
As you can see, I use a YYYY-MM-DD date format in my file names. This makes files names sort chronologically. And if I were to add a Month subfolder, I would include the number of the month at the beginning of the folder name, so the month folders would also sort chronologically.
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Once you have your pics gathered into one folder tree and organized to your taste, you can easily back them up to CD/DVD, flash drive, portable hard drive, or any other media you choose. You can also easily upload them to whatever online photo sharing service, or backup service, or cloud storage service, that you choose, and keep the same organization system.
Consistency is key. If your photos folder is on D: drive on your desktop computer, it should be in the same spot on D: drive on your laptop. This allows you to keep your photo folders easily in sync, because they're in exactly the same spot on all of your computers. And if you have an external hard drive, using the same structure on that drive as well will allow you easily sync it with your computers. This can automate your backups, using any sort of backup software you choose.
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And when all of that is done, I view my pics all the time via a slideshow screensaver on my computer. When I'm not using the computer, it shows a constant slideshow of my pics. I simply change the settings now and then to limit the pics to specific years, or weeks, or days, as my mood changes. Since I started doing this, I see my older pics now much more often than in the film days when they were all buried in albums!