iPhoto is a nice little application to manage your pictures - but it sure could use improvements. Two areas that always annoy me are tagging, and support for multiple libraries.
Especially with large photo collections, iPhoto is sometimes a bit sluggish. Breaking those up into several photo libraries can improve speed and help organize pictures. After all, I rarely want the “Drunken Bacchanal” set together with the “Four Generations At Christmas” set anyways - so why not make sure they stay separate? Enter iPhotoBuddy, a nifty little donation-ware application that allows you to do exactly that.
Its one shortcoming - it doesn’t give too much help splitting existing libraries. If you want that, you’re probably better off with iPhoto Library Manager. While it costs $19.95, it has a host of nice features with regards to splitting & merging of libraries.
And finally, there is tagging. The iPhoto tagging interface as it is is baroque and convoluted. I hate using their keyword system. Which brings me to Keyword Assistant. It allows me to tag things like I’m used to: Just type a comma-separated list of tags, and if the tag doesn’t exist, create it. Just like any other tagging application out there… (Download Keyword Assistant here - the web page hides the download quite well)
Keyword Assistant rocks. Apple seems to have a big blind spot with tagging, which is weird, as the “token” Cocoa UI field (is that the right name? The one for e-mail addresses in Mail and stuff) is perfect for it.