[mst]

That's still no substitute for album collections combining manually selected images (for a photo book for example), or smart albums based on lots of criteria.

I'm afraid once one got used to all the advantages of a database system, there is no way back. I used to be a winamp guy, with all my mp3s stored in a folder structure, artist-album-songname style. Once I switched to the Mac and used iTunes for a little, I never looked back.