Image upload and distribution strategy

I’m a rooky with little to no experience writing code (although I recently succeeded in coding drop shadows for stand alone images, ya-hoo!).

I am using WP + a Photocrati theme + the NextGen photo plugin. Through the sheer learning process I have distributed photos directly to Pages and Posts, and created separate WP, Photocrati and Nextgen galleries. Managing them, and the duplicate images that reside in them, is becoming complex. It also seems very inefficient.

Is it possible to upload a single image then assign its use to all these various locations and manage that distribution over time? Would this require custom code writing or is it built into WP/Photocrati/Nextgen and I just don’t recognize how to invoke it?

Thanks in advance for any insight/guidance.