Yeah, XP does a good job of image-management with explorer. The album-based image management programs like are really just adding another layer of wording to "simplify", but i think those of us who've been doing this ourselves for years won't find much use for them. Albums in these programs are to folders as folders are to directories -- basically it's just another naming convention for the same thing. i do like using Zoombrowser for my digital camera shots because it lets me view my entire collection at once.
Same thing with iTunes. i despite having something like 15,000 files, i knew where almost everything was because i had sorted it into folders. i even knew what the unsorted files were. i was really pissed when it "sorted" my files into folders because it screwed up years of ordering, created a few hundred folders in one, dumped a few thousand untagged files in the root of my music folder, and then made duplicates of some files.
DaCocoBrova, you might wanna look into Pixvue. It integrates into explorer and lets you make collections, annotate files, make PDF or HTML slideshows and more. i don't have much need for this myself, but i find the extended EXIF info that it adds to the file properties window really useful and easier to read than XPs. Also, since it's integrated (rather seemlessly might i add) into explorer, it doesn't use any additional resources. i just wish it supported RAW files...
