I love my Mac, but it is nothing short of mind numbing how Apple chose to disallow easy access to files. ... They want you to do everything through iPhoto
I find it amazing how many people disparage the advantages of a Digital Asset Manager (DAM). I am not personally fond of iPhoto either... but I do love Aperture 3 and it has exactly the same characteristics that you mention.
Do people also disparage the fact that the "Finder App" makes it hard for you to directly manage the "blocks and sectors" on your hard drive? Of course not.
Getting a great program like Aperture 3 (or to a lesser extent iPhoto)... allows you the freedom and power to do MUCH MUCH more than you can do by directly manipulating the file system. The analogy that I made earlier... that "Finder" gives you direct access to your entire file... rather than make you mess with blocks and sectors holds perfectly.
I have found that the vast majority of photographers who have embraced and mastered a DAM would never go back to manually storing pictures within a file system.
Using a file system is a way to
STORE pictures. Using a DAM is a way to
USE pictures. The difference is stunning. Every good DAM allows you a trivial way to export any subset of your pictures into the file system for use in whatever manner you may choose.
/Jim
