I am fairly new to the Mac world and need some advice. Here is my question.... what is the appropriate software to use for cataloging photos given the following: We conduct investigations of construction defects. 30 to 40 projects at any one time. Each project may include 2,500 total photos. 4-5 photographers, each using a different digital camera. The photos must be able to be filtered (searched) by any of several criteria, such as project, date, building, elevation, unit #, component etc. We have tried using Adobe Bridge for key-wording but find it does not work well when networked. IPhoto and Portfolio were not satisfactory. I am looking at Lightroom now but wonder if there is not a more appropriate application considering we only want key-wording and search functions, not any type of image enhancement. Seems like there should be some database type of application for this? Thanks for any advise you can offer.
Apple's Aperture and Adobe's Lightroom are both designed and able to do the types of things you want. There is no right answer about which is better than the other, and there are plenty of threads here on MacRumors discussing the relative merits of either. They have very powerful keywording and filtering capabilities. You can get fully functional 30-day trial editions of both to evaluate what works best for you.