I found out that Automator has a very cool, very simple photo browser that can access the user’s iPhoto Library without activating iPhoto. It generates a window with a list of iPhoto albums in the upper half, and all the thumbnails in the lower half. It also has a little Spotlight bar down below that quickly sorts through the photos in the browser. It is entitled Ask for Photos and is found in the iPhoto section of Automator.
I am a very rookie level AS Studio afficianado (I started in October 2006), but would love to know how I could (or even if I could) construct a similar viewer for images in AS Studio, but NOT for iPhoto, rather for where ever the user chooses. I had a similar conversation with the very helpful jobu in this thread, and I have been slowly plugging along at studying obj-C mysticism since that time.
My project is based on trying to catalog stacks of images stored on CDs and DVDS since 2002. I admit that I am inching closer to simply coughing up $500 for a 1 TB drive to hold all the images at once, but I still enjoy scripting, and would like to know if I can come up with another option.