I Don't Want My Photos to Be Hostage to Apple and Lousy iPhoto!

I desperately need some feedback from former/current PC users who became or also are Mac users who like to look at their photos and organize them, or, at least, some sympathetic ears. ;-)

feel free to completely skip this post if you don't care for talk about the storage and management of digital photos. Boring stuff, I know.

(And Jo(e), I know you're a Mac user and an avid photographer, but maybe you never used a PC so you won't know what I'm complaining about. Sigh...)

I would be a relatively happy Mac "switcher" if it weren't for iPhoto and for the ways that Apple devices completely hijack my ability to simply view and sort through my photos and to back them up in regular external hard-drives which I paid good money for, but which it refuses to talk to. :(

Let's back track. Although I take tons of photos and I'm CRAZY for photos, I'm a plain Jane when it comes to digital photography (maybe that will make a difference in my narrative compared to those of you who are seasoned photo "processers," etc).

What I mean by that is that as a lifelong "plain" PC user, I have always disliked any photo management software that either came with the computer or even online ones such as Picasa (though I used Picasa begrudgingly to post online albums) so I never used them. I simply opened the files with photos in my cameras and cards and pasted them into files which were then organized by month, by year and also, within the year, by theme (e.g. my garden, cats).

Whenever I viewed my photos I always used the plain "windows explorer" (not the browser, I don't know the correct name) viewer that is standard on the PC. It would be the equivalent to Preview in the Macs, although it's WAY WAY WAY better because it let's me simply click the arrow to the next photos, something impossible to do with the Mac previewer -- one is always forced to go to iphoto (which I hate) to do anything with the photos.

Apart from having a hard time to merely view the photos in my MacBook, I don't like that my photos are "hidden away" in iPhoto and not immediately available for emailing (e.g. it's much harder to attach a photo to an email in the Mac) or viewing. If I save any photos to a "pictures" folder (e.g. when getting them from the internet or a friend) I have to import them to iphoto so I can properly view them because one can't really view photos on the "preview" window (only one by one).That's ridiculous!

The other problem is that my laptop refuses to talk to these external hard-drives I bought (one of them for 100 bucks!). How could I know that I needed to buy a special external hard-drive that would talk to Macs? And I can't even return the open device now, and I can't backup my photos, which is something I need to do to feel at peace. Sigh. (I know that the hard drive part is my fault because I should have researched, but then, again, one of the hard drives I already owned talked perfectly fine to my laptop, but one day they stopped talking, just like that. Sigh...).

I could go on and on about these and other issues, but I'll stop complaining and "publish" this post.

If photo taking and organizing weren't such a central part of my computer use, this wouldn't be an issue, but it IS a huge problem for me right now!!! And I have noticed that I take photos much more sparingly now that I feel that Apple has hijacked my photos forever. I feel truly depressed about all that. :(

Is there any hope for me? Is the only way out sucking it up and getting forcibly used to loathsome iphoto? I hope not!