What's a good 3rd party iPhoto replacement?

Question

I have a large number of slideshows which I’ve made with iPhoto 7.1.5 to which I have applied carefully-adjusted effects settings and music for each slide. They are as perfect as I can get them for my usage. I have tried both importing as well as totally re-doing some of  them from scratch in iPhoto 9.1.3 with no success. My settings will not stick in 9.1.3 (yes I have looked at all the other posts and tried the fixes offered in this forum but to no avail) and I do not like the theme based format at all. I like full screen slides with ONLY the settings and syncronization that I have applied to each slide, all of which has worked perfectly for me in 7.1.5.
My great fear is that although my present iMac has and is working perfectly, one day I will have to replace it and whatever new one I get might most likely not run iPhoto 7.1.5 so all of my work could be lost.
I am prepared to drop iPhoto usage altogether and work with a good third party application that will allow me to individually set my slides as I want them set without forcing me to use some theme or other (as the new iPhoto and some third party apps seem to do) and to which I can perfectly synchronize music to the flow of the slides just like I’m able to do in 7.1.5.
My question then is what would be a good third party application for this purpose? Again I am perfectly willing to redo all of the shows from scratch in that new app if it will work the way I’ve described.
Thanks to all for reading this lengthy post  :-)
Rick 

Answer 1

Hello Steven,
As promised I’m letting you know my decision on replacing iPhoto with Aperture for making slideshows. I’m going with Aperture. As a test I imported the iPhoto 7.1.5 pictures from two of my longest and most complex slideshows (no problem at all with that) so as to give Aperture a good tryout. Using the “Classic” mode when choosing themes (actually no theme at all) I was able to very easily rebuild the two shows I was testing. In those two shows each slide is individually timed to the phrases and tempo of the musical background, no easy task in iPhoto 7 but a cinch in Aperture. I noticed a close resemblance to iPhoto 11 ( the newest version) in setting those individual slides, but with Aperture all of the settings I made actually stuck!  That was my main frustration with the newest iPhoto and was the reason I was looking for a replacement in the first place.
All of the effects used for each individual slide were also easy to redo. So the remaking of slideshows from iPhoto is not at all difficult; that is once you’ve figured out the way things are done in Aperture. That took a little time and was occasionally frustrating. I found that just quitting for awhile and resuming the job later was very helpful but once learned, it’s just fine. There is a downloadable PDF manual, which is more or less helpful, but digging in and getting to work on a project is still the best way to learn the application . . . for me, that is ;-) 
Although I use Photoshop Elements for processing my shots before using them in slideshows I found that it’s really handy to use Aperture’s many photo retouching tools on the fly when building slideshows. Something that is very limited in iPhoto. It’s possible that some people may find that those built-in tools are all they need for spiffing up their photos with no need for other applications for that purpose. In my case, I’ll stick with PE for that if for no other reason than that I’m used to using it (and also already have it :-) ).
There are lots of other features available in Aperture that I haven’t yet checked out but that will be something for me to play with later once I get all my slideshows transferred over.
For TD, thanks again for the tip on PhotoToMovie. I gave it a try also but found that it played havoc with the quality of my photos. Once I saw that, I stopped checking it out. Too bad since it is about a quarter of the price of Aperture.
Rick