Picture organizing software

I have used Photoshop Elements for about 4 years now, starting with PE3, and now PE6. It's nice, though not free. I primarily bought it for organizing my pictures, and have come to appreciate the many editing capabilities as well. But, I have found some pretty annoying 'features' as well:

• By now there are some 12000 pictures in it, and the organizer is getting really slow (on my AMD Athlon64 3000+, 2GB). You use the organizer constantly, so that is a problem.
• The tagging system is basically very good. But the interface to work with it is not. All tags are displayed in a hierarchial list. You assign tags to photo's by dragging the tag to the photo. For searching, you click a checkbox in front of the tag. If you have many tags (I have), you're constantly scrolling the tag list. You cannot easily do this with some shortcuts.
• You cannot zoom further than 'fit in window' in the organizer itself. For that you have to start the preview (F11). Which has another problem: it is horribly slow on RAW files.
• The editor has very many functions inherited from it's big brother Photoshop, and together with my Wacom tablet it's a fun to use. If... it would not crash about every 5 minutes. I must say, on the aforementioned PC. On my Dell - Intel laptop, this problem is not present.
• The program is very eager at doing things automatically. Just now, I switched to it (simple Alt+Tab), and then it started 'updating...' for 2 minutes or so. No clue what needed updating though....

One thing on the upside: As of version 6, PE uses an SQLite database for it's data. So with some SQL knowledge and common sense you can do some nice things. Like moving all the pictures to another disc.

Well, if PE is starting to fail on me, let's look at all those free alternatives that have emerged lateley. After some reading on the Internet I decided to try Picasa 3 (I was already using 2 for exchange with PicasaWeb), open source My Photo Index and Microsoft Photo Gallery.

My Photo Index: Indexing the first small directory of pictures looked promising. So let's try one with (Panasonic FZ-50) RAW files in them. Hmm, it stops responding. That's not good. OK, it's open source and .Net, so theoretically I could try to fix this myself. But hey, I was working on my other hobby now.

Picasa 3: Indexing goes well, also with the RAW files. As per version 3 it also correctly recognizes multi-word tags (instead of breaking them up), that's nice. Less impressive: labels can not be ordered in a hierarchy. Let's try the search. Simple search box in the upper right corner. Type in 'cat': It matches not just on the label, but on all sorts of things. I cannot find an option to search just the labels, let alone to combine multiple labels. PE is doing far better here! Adding labels however, can be done entirely with the keyboard. I like that.

Photo Gallery: This is Microsoft, so 'My Pictures' is by default indexed. And cannot be deleted from the index either. Well, MS, not everyone saves his pictures in 'My Pictures'. Duh. However, you can add other directories as well. From here the story is pretty much the same as with Picasa. No hierarchy, no obvious way to add labels, same search-problems. File | Exit.

So, the sad conclusion is that I will have to stick to PE, or install Linux on my main machine. Since digiKam or F-Spot is said to do this very well. But that is still one bridge too far for me.

However, while writing this I have gave F-Spot a try on my secondary PC with WUBI (Ubuntu alongside Windows). Wow! Tagging with the keyboard, hierarchical tags, search on multiple tags (And + Or functionality), correct import of multi-word tags and RAW files. If you press '/', you get a Find-typing area that understands both tags and filenames. It just does as promised. Why can't all the others do this??? Maybe I should turn over to Ubuntu after all. Whooaa, I need some time & beer to get used to that!

If you have any other good ideas, please keep me and other readers posted.