in case you are looking for a imagedatabase that’s free, respectively not expensive in the advanced editions and that feels like you would have written it for yourself (not because it’s bad, but because it has all the features you would put into your own program), go and look for idimager!
this decent programm still has some minor lacks in stability and performance (though no image-database i’ve seen is simething like fast asap it comes to storing meta-information in iptc/xmp tags), but it has some verry nice features.
beside the usual edit & view-features there is a lot of goodies like it’s own script-language, batch renaming with easy customiseable rules and so on.
but the feature i was looking for was to be able to leave my 30k+ images in the filesystem like i am used to have it done before. have views based on the directory structure, plus having the chance to build albums and galleries based on a database, but not having to change anything in the filesystems. and last but not least - put credits, location and keyword meta-information in the pictures. not a properitary database, but iptc/xmp tags. this way i can spent months now to index all the pictures and be sure to do this only once. no matter if i switch to mac, unix or any other standard-conform application. no matter if the software-company goes down, there are no new versions of the program or they get worse like other programs while putting out newer versions. the meta-information is in the pictures and therefore safe for any program/os change.
a very nice side effect are hierarchical keywords, version-stacks and other nice features in this program. definetly worth a closer look if you have some thousand images you want to categorize, rate,… though you should invest some 30 minutes or so to quickly read through the 1st chapters of the manual in order to operate this beast without getting confused by all the features.
this said i’m back into lurking mode. means working at office, beeing tired and beside that taggin’n'ratin’ my pictures. don’t expect news here soon. 
oh and forget about politics in austria. our hopefully soon has-been new goverment and and governor… yippieee… gotta take a closer thought about not returning home from one of the next trips to africa…
