Do you love iphoto, have orginization tricks?

Question

The only thing I miss about my PC and hate about the Mac is iphoto.  I find orginization of my events cumbersome.  I really dislike making albums and only do that if I am going to make a photo book, need a place for "pictures to print" or am going to use the album for monething, like transfer that group of pictures to my iphone. 
I miss having a folder that I can put sub folders in such as a folder called, for example "My baby" with 12 subfolders for month 1 -12.
So, do any of you LOVE iphoto and why?  (Did you ever use a PC?) 
I am also having issues organizing events, which is what I have decided works the best for the way I choose to organize.  I just don't want events and albums for everything. 
I need my events organized alphabetically.  Yes, I go under view and ask my events to be sorted accendingly by title, but does that work?  Not always.  Anyone have any suggestions.
Lastly, for any of you that dislike iphoto, what else do you use for your photo's?  I can't imagine professional photographers who use a Mac love iphoto. 
Thanks for all the help you can provide me!
S

Answer 1

I'm with Larry on the whole "if you don't like it don't use it" thing. It's not compulsory and - like any app - it's not for everyone. But if you "dislike making albums" then you're not really using iPhoto and so it will always seem limited. That's a bit like only using a web browser and complaing that your computer is limited...
And this is not an iPhoto versus PC thing. It's the difference between using a databse for data - that is, and app specifically attuned to the requirements and possibilites of photographs and one that doesn't know the difference between a photo, a song or a letter to your mom, and treats them all the same.
Files-in-folders is a very limited way of organising anything. What do you do with files that belong in two or three places? Take a snap of your dog and your cat. Does it go in the dog folder? The Cat one? Organising on time seems basic enough, but once you've been doing it for 10 years you find yourself trying to remember what year that X was - 2005? 06? 04? and then there's a lot of rooting around in folders looking at icons. Add in the number of photos involved - it doesn't take very long to get past 50k - and the search gets more difficult all the time.
Then of course there are all the other things - non-destructive processing, OS integration and so on - that you miss by using a file manager to organise your photos.
Here's a canned answer I offer to demonstrate some of the possibilities of iPhoto.
I use Events simply as big buckets of Photos: Spring 08, July - Nov 06 are typical Events in my Library. I use keywords and Smart Albums extensively. I title the pics broadly.
I keyword on a
Who
What
Where basis (The When is in the photos's Exif metadata). I also rate the pics on a 1 - 5 star basis.
Using this system I can find pretty much find any pic in my 50k library in a couple of seconds.
So, for example, I have a batch of pics titled 'Seattle 08' and a  typical keywording might include: John, Anne, Landscape, mountain, trees, snow. With a rating included it's so very easy to find the best pics we took at Mount Rainier.
File -> New Smart Album
set it to 'All"
title contains Seattle
keyword is mountain
keyword is snow
rating is 5 stars
Or, want a chronological album of John from birth to today?
New Smart Album
Keyword is John
Set the View options to Sort By Date Ascending
Want only the best pics?
add Rating is greater than 4 stars
The best thing about this system is that it's dynamic. If I add 50 more pics of John  to the Library tomorrow, as I keyword and rate them they are added to the Smart Album.
In the end, organisation is about finding the pics. The point is to make locating that pic or batch of pics findable fast. I don't believe that any of that would be possible with a file manager.
Finally, you have really only got two choices here: using the file manager or using a database. All of the database apps - iPhoto, Aperture, Lightroom, Picasa - all work in broadly the same way - yes, with different bells and whistles - but essentially the same.