photo mess

Help. I love my MacBook Pro but hate iphoto. I appreciate the photos being organized by the date they were taken, but the thousands of photos that were moved from my old computer are one huge mass. I am looking for a program that lets me make a folder, name it, then click and drag photos into it. The One on One people at the Apple store said iphoto won't let me do that. Does anyone have a suggestion. I need something simple. I have used Adobe Photo shop before but mostly for editing photos, not for organizing my mess. I have a digital shoebox of pictures that need to be organized. Help.

PS elements does the job for me.

Lightroom is an excellent organiser as well.

There's no reason to not use iPhoto for this, but it requires that you give up the idea of micro-managing your file folders (which you really don't need to be doing -- that's what the computer is for!).

First, figure out WHY the "photos you brought over from the PC" are "one huge mass." This will be the key to solving the whole issue. There's no reason photos imported from a PC wouldn't have the EXIF information iPhoto needs to sort them properly. How were they brought over, or perhaps they were created from scans?

If need be, iPhoto has easy "batch" changing of dates on photos (I use this a lot when scanning pictures, since the scan is "dated" the day of the scan, not the day of the photo). Of course, once iPhoto has the correct date on the pictures, they "automagically" get sorted into events as they should.

If you REALLY want to do the busy-work of managing folders, you can do that with PS Elements (though I personally don't like the way it organizes) or ACDSee Pro for Mac (disclosure: I used to work for them), which catalogs the photos while totally leaving them wherever you put them (which IME often turns out to be a bad idea unless you are a really meticulous file manager -- some people love that sort of thing, not me).

Or you could try Picasa for Mac