Picture Arena

So what is the first thing that you don't do when you get a Mac? Repeat the following to yourself over and over again,
"DO NOT STICK ALL OF YOUR PHOTO ARCHIVES IN IPHOTO!"
At first, I thought iPhoto was one of the coolest apps I have seen - I liked the way you can create albums and especially liked the way it thumbnailed my movie MP4 files (I had to pay for software on a Windows machine to do that). You can see a screenshot of Picture Arena above with some of my movies thumbnailed.
So I have about 10,000+ photos taken over many years in many different countries. I usually keep my photos sorted by country. So what I did was to drag my photos to iPhoto and create albums for photos taken in DE, UK, CN, JP etc. What iPhoto does is to copy the photos to your home directory and sort everything by date. So if I had a photo dated 5th Aug 2001, iPhoto would go ahead and place that image in 2001 > 8 > 5 (or something like that). This may not be such a bad thing until iPhoto starts to schmuck up. In my case, it started to take ages to start and then finally one day - poof. iPhoto refused to start up - no error message - it would just exit without displaying a single photo. I looked on the net to find out if anybody shared my problem - and not to my surprise I found tons - here is a page full of iPhoto victims. I did try rebuilding the catalog and wot not but to no avail. Luckily, I still had the majority of my photos backed up elsewhere sorted by country - but while I was in the UK, I was using iPhoto to look after my photos - I had to go into all the iPhoto created folders and extract my photos manually, 2005 > 5 > 4, 2005 > 5 >5 etc. I just cant believe that Apple brought out such a shit, crap, useless piece of seven shaded bantha poodoo - and to make matters worse - if you did not get it bundled with your OS, they make you pay for it!
Anyway, all is not lost because Picture Arena will save the day. Whilst it will not salvage your corrupted iPhoto library for you, it will make sure that something like that will not happen again.
Here are a few reasons why I found Picture Arena worth babbling on about. 1. Picture Arena has the option to leave your photos where they are instead of copying them to a different location - meaning that I can leave my country sorted folders intact where they are.
2. As a Xacti video camera user, I need a way to manage my MP4 files - Picture Arena thumbnails these files too.
3. Picture Arena thumbnails with speed! I am not sure how they do it but thumbnails are created a zillion times faster than iPhoto or any other program that I tried out. Just download the trial version and have a look for yourself.
4. Picture Arena also comes with a plethora of options - more than I can be bothered to mention - but don't take my word for it - download it and see for yourself.

Oh, did I forget to mention that after upgrading to Tiger, Apple disabled the ability to not startup iPhoto when a digital camera is attached? (different subject but you can only set your default browser under Safari > preferences). I really hope that as the Mac user base grows, that Apple don't end up like Sony.