I tried Apple's new iPhoto program tonight. I initially hesitated using it because the reviews I had read said it was strong on organizing, weak on photo editing. It is strong on organizing, but only within the tool. Try to make any sense of how it organizes things on disk and you're on your own. I wish more developers would follow a Keep It Simple, Silly principal.
The reason I thought I'd try it is because I had read that you could launch external photo editors from within iPhoto. I also found this article about using a small Applescript to send an image to the GIMP, my photo editor of choice. It does work, both from Apple's Finder (aka Explorer for Windows users) and iPhoto. The problem is that iPhoto doesn't update the thumbnail after you edit the photo from an external program and there doesn't seem to be a clean refresh menu to say "hey! look again! It's different now! I've rotated, cropped, etc". So the thumbnail doesn't look like the picture after you've edited it.
Fine, I thought. I may be able to find an answer on this later. Let me try out the 'export to web page album' option. It made some of the lamest web pages! Worse yet, it used those same incorrect thumbnails!
So I returned to the issue of trying to fix the thumbnails. I went into where the thumbnails were stored on my hard disk. I found the subdirectory where the thumbnails were stored and deleted it. I thought perhaps iPhoto would then be forced to recreate the thumbnails. No! The program wouldn't launch because the photo database has been tampered with. I hate file storage mechanisms which completely try to take over and have no relationship with what you see on disk.
I think I'll at least be able to use the script I found to send pictures from Apple's file browser directly to GIMP. Maybe I can make another script which then scales the pictures and sends them to iGal, the package I've been using for making the web pages so far. If I get super-duper motivated, I'll come up with a script to upload the web pages to my internet service provider. Judging by my energy levels after the kids get to bed, I wouldn't count on any of this... :-)