Needless to say, I'm not thrilled with iPhoto 2 [1]. I'm looking closely at iView MediaPro [2]. I love the way iView MediaPro exports metadata in tab delimited files, and the way it scales easily to a bazillion images with blazing performance on my iBook 600Mhz. I'm warming to the idea of storing the mass of my photos on my household Win2K server (need more storage, slap another ultracheap 150GB drive) using iView MediaPro.

In this case I'd keep my photos in iView MediaPro, but if I needed to use some special feature of iPhoto I'd dump them in iPhoto. [3]

When you compare iView and iPhoto, what are the things iPhoto 2 does that iView/GraphicConverter don't do? Do you see sets and subsets as comparable to libraries and albums (yes, iView is geekish in comparison to iPhoto)?

john

[1] It says something ominous about Apple development that they didn't consider the performance issues sufficiently important to address in this major release. On the other hand, it's to Apple's favor that iPhoto 2 allows metadata export via AppleScript, though I don't know if sort order is accessible via AppleScript.
See my usenet posting:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=jfaughnan&hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&safe=active&scoring=d&selm=5c0dbfb4.0302011459.78bd6dc%40posting.google.com&rnum=1

[2] http://www.iview-multimedia.com/products/index.html
Scales to bazillions of images, stores offline on any media addressable by Mac, maintains local thumbnails, works with GraphicConverter and OS X image import, has generous evaluation model, great documentation, tiny application, costs $80 or so with a printed manual.

[3] How to pass metadata (title, comments) into iPhoto is still a challenge, but one wonders about AppleScript. My next fun project will be learning AppleScript -- I last looked at AS about 8 years ago.