I have 17,000 photos to sort on my mac book pro. whatis the easiest way to delete or choose photos?

Bembridge

You have a big job ahead. You seem to be confounded by the features of iCloud & PhotoStream combined with your devices.

You need to Sort on iCloud and then delete the duplicates(if any, this may be a 'syncing' issue) - then delete the ones you desire.

These should get you going. There are many links inside these pages too.

My Photo Stream FAQ - Apple Support

iCloud: Set up My Photo Stream

iCloud Photo Sharing FAQ - Apple Support

iCloud: My Photo Stream overview

Get help using My Photo Stream - Apple Support

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Delete photos from My Photo Stream - Apple Support

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Any webpage CAN be printed... but ±17,000 thumbnails? That's a LOT of paper

Plan your work, then work your plan.

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Past problem was transferring from an old mac book and the photos duplicated some into thumb nail.

Sounds like you imported one library into another which is a big NO-NO. That imports masters, edited versions and thumbnails as new, original images. A big mess. Do you still have the library on the old MacBook available? If so copy it to your new Mac and open it with iPhoto. No importing is necessary.

Once you get a working library with just full sized image files you can use the Star Rating to tag favorite photos or add keywords to them.

To group all photos by year create a smart album with criteria like the following for all photos in 2008:

Then apply the star rating or keyword as necessary.

To remove the photos you don't want create a new smart album with one of these criteria. Don't need to use both:

To delete photos from a smart album select about 100-200 at a time and use the key combination Command+Option+Delete to move them to the iPhoto Trash. Empty the iPhoto Trash and the Trash bin in the Dock.

It sounds like you made a major mistake and imported your old library into th new one - NEVER import an iphoto library - it does not work and as you see creates a massive mess

The best solution if you still have access to the old MB is to trash the bad iphoto library (wait to empty the trash until you have a good, working library) and transfer the library correctly - Connect the two Macs together (network, firewire target mode, etc) or use an external hard drive formatted Mac OS extended (journaled) and drag the iPhoto library intact as a single entity from the old Mac to the pictures folder of the new Mac - launch iPhoto on the new mac and it will open the library and convert it as needed and you will be ready move forward.

LN

PS - Note that the advice involving PhotoStream has nothing to do with your problem and following it will be a waste of time - the problem is very simple as OT and I have described - if you do not have access to the old library on the MB then OT's solution is the best - if you do then mine starting over and doing it correctly is the best