No hard feelings, Cheers!

iTunes is subtly inconsistent, but when properly configured it’s a fine program. It stores most of the useful information on the files themselves.

I’m going to ignore the (substantial) performance issues because people have already touched upon them. But the iPhoto interface team must have been composed of the dregs of Apple’s designers, because the application’s workflow is so brittle that if a single one of their (mostly unreasonable) assumptions about how you work is wrong the whole mess becomes useless. They assume all of your photos have correct EXIF data or else everything is out of order and must be fixed by hand. If you have thousands of old scanned photos… well it sucks to be you. They assume you always want photos in chronological order. They assume They assume you do not want to share individual photos along with metadata with other people (e.g. sending photos to your family) because modifications like your carefully modified dates are stored in the iPhoto database, not on the image file itself. (Why anyone would voluntarily allow their data to be held hostage in a buggy database like iPhoto’s is beyond me.)

I might even be able to use iPhoto without dying a little inside if I had never used superior photo management utilities like Google’s Picasa, Coverflow in the Finder, or Windows Explorer. As a Mac lover, it saddens me to say this, but if you have ever used a photo management utility, you have probably used a better photo management utility than iPhoto.

So, my recommendation for photo management? Fusion and Picasa for $80. If you have a lot of photos and need the performance, Bootcamp and Picasa for free. I feel terrible for people falsely lured to the Mac platform with false promises of easily managing all your photos, and hope that they don’t see that as a reflection on the Mac experience as a whole. Most of the programs out there for the Mac platform are as pretty as iPhoto but actually work intuitively too! Please don’t leave!

An example may help: We have been renovating our house, and have photos in a main folder called Rennovation, and sub-folders for each room, Bedroom1 Bedroom2, Lounge, Kitchen, Bathroom etc. Inside each sub-folder are folders for each stage of the works on that room. I can enter the Bathroom folder, and then open the various folders documenting the various stages of renovation over several months. As the kitchen project was running at the same time, I can enter the kitchen folder to look at the various stages of that part of the project. In WINDOWS Live Photo I can select ‘Bathroom’-Phase 7 and can see a slide show of that phase, or can select ‘Bathroom’ and run a slide show for all the Bathroom phases, one after the next. In iPhoto, ‘Events’, Phase 7 and 8 of the bathroom, has phase 4 of the kitchen between them, because of the date stamping. But all continuity is lost because I have Phase 1 of Bedroom1, and Phase 2 of the Lounge in between also; along with my photos of a trip to London, one to Dublin, and those of a friends Wedding, my dad’s birthday, and a trip to a cricket match. What a mess!
Ok, so it looked like I’m going to be using Finder for now. But when I installed VISTA Ultimate in Bootcamp, and tried WINDOWS LIVE PHOTO for the first time, it did what I wanted.
I switched to MAC because I was sick of Gates and Co. forcing me to do it their way, and because everyone said how much more productive I could be with a MAC.
If APPLE are listening, please give us the chance to choose how we want to organise our photos in iPhoto. At the moment I am using WINDOWS LIVE PHOTO for slideshows.
Disappointed after spending over £2000 on a MAC, to find that I either have to go back to WINDOWS or install another application on MAC.

I just did a quick search and found this:

http://www.oldapps.com/iPhoto.php

–Isn’t it a bit too bold (or insane) going into a folder used by an organizing app and start changing data? I also tried that, mind you, but as soon as I saw that it was more than just my images, I simply left it alone – and GTFO and started using something else, as I preferred to be in control. Interestingly, iPhoto 7 (iLife’08) converts the iPhoto Library into a package, so users will perhaps think at least twice before touching. (Though they should have made it a package before, I think).

–Adam made a good point about not using iPhoto in 2037. But iPhoto (6 at least) does offer using your photos without importing them into the library, and that’s what I am now investigating: so I can use my external disk in OS X and Windows, with whatever software and filesystem organization, but with the iPhoto library ready if needed. (the problem will then be syncing the iPhoto library to the actual state of the photos… but a bit of discipline, care and “iPhotoDiet” (freeware) should do the trick, although I’m hoping that iPhoto will be careful itself)