That's exactly what I'm getting at. I don't know of any other tool that can search through, e.g., ACDSee's database. However, any photo album app will allow you to save tags into EXIF or IPTC metadata in the images themselves. And since this is a standard, any desktop search app worth its salt can access it.
Having done that, now I can use my search app to find, say, "Mexico 2008" and get all my related photos, emails exchanged with the travel agent, and the AVI of the time-lapse sunset I made. Sure, all of these things are handled through different apps. But the ability to search like this allows me to have all of the materials related to a given project in front of me at once. (Which is why I also think that the Windows way of organizing files under "My Documents" in app-centric folders is idiotic)
-CWuestefeld
Some people are just too lazy to add half a dozen tags to each and every image they store on their computer. Do
you really do that? :o
On a related note I'd like to mention delicious.com, a social bookmarking site. This site allows you to assign multiple tags to a bookmark. which sounds awesome in theory (multiple categorization, yay!), but after a while I stopped bothering with all this tagging. Not sure why, but it felt like "too much work"... It seems there's a subtle, but significant difference between tagging and the capability to put a file in more than one folder.
Open source people sometimes amaze me. You refuse to use any such program (even though, as I noted, there's a standard way for them to store their data in most cases), despite how much good it might do you.
-CWuestefeld
Maybe I should also mention the second reason why I don't use albums and the likes: I don't have too many pictures on my computer (a few hundred or so, rarely updated), and I stopped collecting music a long time ago (last.fm anyone?), so there's not much to organize here. This is not too amazing an explanation, is it?