Best way to natively tag photos on OS X

For years, I've been simply taking the native image stored on my iphone and placing them in a chronologic folder (Year > Month > Event)...that was it. No tagging, no renaming photos, no nothing. Then, I was dinking around in Windows 7 and saw how awesome the tagging seemingly was. Simply stated, I don't do ANY photo editing at all. All I'm interested in is tagging photos based on the topics in them (work, dog, house, christmas, etc) so that while I can store the native images as I am now but be able to search my photos based on those topics in them. My biggest thing is to have this be a native function if possible as I don't want to get started and find that in 2 years, I can no longer use it because the third party crapped out on me.
Does anyone have any suggestions or know of the best way to do this? 

Trouble is, Spotlight comments are restricted to Macs (they use .ds_store files) and the Windows commenting system you mention in your first post is restricted to Windows. Neither actually "natively tags" the file in an environment-neutral way.
However, EXIF data is actually embedded in image files. You can edit a file's EXIF data from within iPhoto if you want. I do understand what you mean about longevity, but I would honestly prefer to use something like iPhoto's tagging features, which are much more flexible, and make it really easy to tag and smart-group pictures into sets. You don't have to use any of iPhoto's editing features - it does very well on organization alone. If you absolutely don't want to touch your existing folder structure, get Aperture instead, which allows you to keep the organization you've done.
Matt

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