I love taking photos. If you haven’t checked out my flickr stream, you will see I take lots of photos. One of my major weakness has always been losing my photos! I would always take hundreds of photos, like a couple, clean them up, resize them, put them online or something, then forget about the originals and at some point inadvertently delete them. Drag!
I had tried Picasa, and it’s a great app, but it didn’t have quite the same ease I have found with iPhoto on my Macbook Pro. Anytime I plug in my camera, it asks, it downloads, I do 99% of my editing in iPhoto, and I am set, my photos are saved, organized and kept safely. I back them up to my external, and I don’t lose anything.
With tagging I never have problems finding them and I can quickly create sets by ranking to put on any of my iPods.
For those of you using a PC, Picasa is an admirable replacement. It’s not quite iPhoto in my opinion, but I would say it’s the best photo management application on PC.
The bottom line here is don’t try to organize your photos in an arcane file system yourself. Find a program that allows you to organize by events or tags and let the application do the work for you. You will be glad you did.