media photos image files

I am prototyping my first Drupal site using 5.10, and have spent 40+ hours researching the many ways of posting images - or at least the top dozen mainstream methods (yes fellow noobs everyone feels your pain on this!)

I want to have a single standard workflow for uploading/attaching/displaying all images on the site, so that I have both maximum flexibility now and protection against the coming changes in how Drupal (core?) will handle them - I don't want to have to do complex data conversions later on, or God forbid manual editing of old nodes.