Well, I’ve been using iPhoto, Lightroom in it’s different beta stages and now I had a demo of Aperture. I’ve been shooting digital for quite some time now, and scanned lots of negatives from when I still shot film and my parents before me. My collection is about 35.000 pictures, spanned over many DVDs and CDs. Pictures that are virutally inaccessible because I don’t know where they are. So I decided a while back to throw them all into a harddrive and try out different programs.
First program I had to ditch was iPhoto. Even iPhoto 6 becomes unusable after about 5000 pictures. It’s just ghastly slow on my Macbook Pro 15″ 2,33Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM. So that’s inexcusable.
Second program was Lightroom, after about 10.000 photos it was very slow. At 16.000 photos it grinded to a halt. Not even half way there. 
A shame, really, as I really liked Lightroom and had high hopes for it, I have now abandoned it.
I grabbed a demo of aperture, and hit a very convenient limit. Where Lightroom and iPhoto just died more and more, Aperture said:
Aperture has max 10000 pictures
Aperture projects are limited to 10000 master images each. You should create new projects and import your images in batches of less than 10000.
Quite convenient, really
So, what do I do now? Shooting mainly RAW I don’t suppose changing to F-Spot is much of an alternative, especially since it’s proved quite inaccessible on OS X. I guess I’ll have to talk with the crowd that uses iView Media Pro and see how it fares. Do you have any other recommendations?
Get it here
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Have you tried kphotoalbum (formerly known as kimdaba). It seems to handle large numbers of photographs rater well. Depending on your camera model etc, it may or may not handle raw images (but I think there is a good chance) …
Thank you for informing me about kphotoalbum. I’m compiling it via fink now and I’m looking forward to see how it handles the challenge.