[iBook] iPhoto woes

[Angus Wallace]

Dear list,

I have a question regarding iPhoto (5), but first a little background...

I had many photos, arranged in iPhoto. I didn't store them on my  
ibook, but on a fileserver, that I accessed wirelessly. I was adding  
some photos to it, when the connection transiently dropped out,  
resulting in a trashed iphoto library. I couldn't recover this so,  
although I still have all my photos, all the organisation is lost.. :-(
This led me to think about the advantage of putting photos in folders  
according to the photo album, as opposed to iPhoto organising them in  
some crazy way, and storing all the info in a single (corruptible)  
file... Unfortunately iPhoto doesn't seem to allow this.

Question:
Does anyone use other (more flexible) photo management software on  
Mac? If so, how do you find it, and what are its advantages?
(free would be nice ;-)

Cheers all,
-Angus