As for keeping files in a database, both iPhoto and Aperture on the Mac use packages for their databases, and these do contain the unmodified original photos. If all else — including exporting from within the app — fails, you can still “Show Package Contents” for a database in the Finder and rescue the media that way.

Same for iTunes, by the way: its media library is just a folder tree, sorted by artists and albums, and the important metadata is embedded right inside the individual files.

Of course, if you do not like any of these applications because you find their user interfaces lacking, that’s a different matter entirely…

What if some day this piece of software is no longer available or supported? Then all my efforts I put into it are lost. And this risk I simply don’t wonna take.

Moreover, some pieces of software like this don’t operate on an existing file tree, but they insist on importing files they “administer” into a proprietary “database,” so that I have two copies of them — one is the original, unmodified file, the other one is the one in the database. I could delete the original copy, but what if the “proprietary database” is corrupt one day? Sometimes you can’t (easily, if at all) extract individual files from such databases. Sometimes original files will be modified in some way, such as flattening folder paths, renaming files, modifying the file content (e. g. by embedding meta info), etc.

All this is simply not acceptable for me.

Had you used iPhoto (on OS X) or Picasa (on Windows), for example, you would have been done with resizing and uploading in a few minutes, instead of spending much more time and unnecessary effort like you apparently did.

In a blog post about note-taking software, I recently read that only programmers insist on managing media data on a file level, and I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment: if it wasn’t for Aperture, whose manual expressly reminds one not to mess around with the raw image files contained in Aperture’s library, I’d either have given up on digital photography or lost my mind. If I do, however, want to manage some files manually, I can easily export images from Aperture as needed.

The very fact that I do _not_ have to handle such media on the file level, and can instead resort to using extensive organizing features — including keywords, EXIF data management, calendar filtering, and more — lets me concentrate on what I really want to do, which is managing content, not containers.