I've been looking at photo management software lately, for a number of different reasons. The biggest reason is that I have a shiny new camera that I intend to take thousands of pictures with.
iPhoto isn't a horrible program, but for the basic tweaking that you need to do to every photo in a raw photo world, it's not adequate. You can't batch adjust photos, for example. Its file management is also very own and conquer (as opposed to file referencing, which I'll get to in a minute). I love iPhoto, but I find myself outgrowing it.
I also have Adobe Bridge, which came with the CS3 suite and Photoshop. The program is really intended to be a catch-all media management program, and it does that very well. That said, it works in the physical file space as opposed to referencing photos. In other words, it doesn't comply to the "bin" organization that video editing software has followed for years. In Avid or Final Cut or whatever, the media can exist virtually anywhere, but you organize it in bins, which are simply references to the original media. I also don't like that adjustments are made by launching the camera raw app, which is cumbersome and doesn't let you make batch adjustments to photos.
Apple's Aperture, on the other hand, does the kind of adjustments you need to do on the fly, does file references with project "folders" and such, much like the video programs do. I love the way it displays data, applies adjustments to a range, and its implementation of the loupe tool is easily the best of any program I've seen. The only thing I fault it for is that it doesn't support the digital negative standard, and it doesn't save the adjustment data in the "sidecar" format the way Bridge does, so it can be easily read by Photoshop. On the other hand, its vault feature makes archiving the media itself a breeze, and that I think is extremely important.
I tried Adobe Lightroom as well, and while comparable to Aperture in many ways, and with killer Photoshop integration, I find the UI to be very cumbersome, to the point it even competes with your actual content. Maybe I just didn't give it enough of a chance, but it didn't strike me as very good.
I've got a 30-day trial on Aperture, so I'm giving it a whirl to see how I like it. The idea of spending another $250 on something when I already have something that kinda does the job is annoying, but it's almost like a rounding error compared to what I paid for the camera gear. So where I am now is trying things both ways. The cat photos I recently shot as a test, for example, I've processed with Bridge and Aperture. Obviously Aperture was far sweeter.
We'll see how it goes.
I have struggled with photo management software since switching to the Mac but settled on Lightroom. I found Aperture's interface to be to reliant on keyboard shortcuts impossible to learn without studying the manual. I also didn't like the dozens of popup window menus, similar to iPhoto.
I do miss the tight coupling with iPhoto though. Once you have your albums set up in any program other than iPhoto, viewing on an Apple TV, iPhone or any other device becomes cumbersome.
I also got Lightroom back when it was only $200, so that helped my decision as well.