I've used iPhoto since its initial release both at home and at work as my primary photo library. So far I haven't encountered problems and I have found it to be remarkably stable. However hard drives and software are corruptable so it behooves the user to make use of iPhotos "Burn Disk" command which is specifically designed to archive a iPhoto Library to a CD or DVD. A good time to do this is before and after major system or iPhoto software upgrades.

Relaunching iPhoto after a version upgrade leads to a warning that the Library needs to be upgraded as well and will no longer be usable by the older software. I've never had problems with this upgrade process but it nice to have peace of mind.

The raw photos are stored in iPhoto in a folder structure that is organized by date and the images are unmodified so they can always be retrieved manually. I have found this easy to interface with other programs, namely Filemaker Pro. In this way it is easy to view selected photos in a relational database without having to copy or import the photos.

The photo editing features have gotten much more sophisticated and it is usually not necessary to use Photoshop to make minor adustments.

iPhoto does a great job of sharing selected photos on an a local intranet. Oddly enough, it does not have a builtin feature allowing Users on a single computer to share a common library. This can be achieved by moving the iPhoto Library to the Shared user folder and placing an alias to the iPhoto Library in each users Picture folder. There is a snag, however. Photos placed in iPhoto with a new date will only be changeable by the User who imported them. This is because new folders are created with Read only permission for other users. Someone might know how to change this default behavior of the Shared user directory but my solution has been to periodically run an applescript which makes all of the iPhoto Library subfolders both Read and Writable.

In comparison I've tried out the Photo organizing software that is comes with Nikon cameras (Nikon View) and Photoshop. I found both of them very clunky, slow, non-intuitive or PC-like interfaces. The first few generations of Nikon View were unstable and unusable, but its probably better now. My impression is that they are afterthoughts and were ported from software designed for PCs