Yes, it's a very pretty app. I don't have that many DVDs or CDs to catalog, but I do have lots of books, and the one application I think this might prove invaluable for is for having to make a future claim against my (can't use the word because of comment spam). My friend has already cataloged his DVD collection and found he has roughly US$8,000 invested. We've probably got at least that much in books. For that alone, I could see spending the forty.

Oh, I'm tempted; a friend of mine has been cataloguing her books and loves it. The ability to be really anal and say "bought this on this date, read it last here, loaned it over there" appeals.

OK, I know this is somewhat off-topic, but I was just reminded of how much I hate these computers "For the rest of you."
My father in law had some photos on his Mac Laptop, in iPhoto, that he wanted us to have copies of. So I went over to try and pull them off. Geez! It took me about half an hour to try to cut through the effing metaphors. I don't want to know about "albums" or "folders" or anything! I just want to burn some damn files onto a CD for heaven's sake! But there seemed to be just no way to get the damn thing to say "here are all the jpeg files" and then take that information and use it to burn a CD.
Fine; it's great that these Mac folks have all their user-friendly metaphors, but for the sake of all that's holy, LEAVE A WAY TO CUT THROUGH THE NOISE! The damn things seem like a Fun house to me....
Sure, maybe we Linux users have a long way to go before "single-icon drag-installed applications are arranged in their disk image windows." whatever the hell THAT means, but at least we can list files, type commands to the shell and get some damn computing done!
Whew! Now I feel better!

$ find ~/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library/ -name \*.jpg -print0 | xargs -0 do_whatever

Whatever.

Robert,

As Zachery pointed out, you do have a shell.

That being said, after being indoctrinated for years by that sort of thing on Linux, it does take some time to "unlearn" all the bogus crap you have to go through to do basic things on a Linux (and maybe Windows too, I wouldn't know).

You see, in iPhoto you just make an album of the photos you want on the CD or DVD (just use the library if you just want everything) and click on the "Burn" button. That's it. There's no second step.

- ask

Robert,

Once you think of iPhoto as being a *database* instead of a *viewer*, it all makes more sense. iPhoto is a database, and photos can be included in multiple albums, tagged with metadata, and all sorts of good stuff. But that's why you can't just say "show me the raw stuff."

(Except, of course, as ABH says, you can ask it to make a CD for you.)

That Ars Technica review got on my "bullshit-of-the-month" list. I'm having a hard time seeing how a non-standard installation procedure is a *good* thing.

Your criticism of drag-and-drop installation is that it is "non-standard"? Oh man.