A couple months ago, I started on a project to digitize all my family's old photo albums. I bought a scanner with a negative feeder, and a automatic print feeder. I have since scanned over 2000 photos. Every photo in my library is tagged with captions and any best-known people, locations, dates. Since many of these images are historic (people and places I don't recognize), the metadata associated to the photo is as important as the image itself.
I evaluated many photo managers, including Photoshop Elements, Picasa, and ThumbsPlus. I really liked ThumbsPlus -- especially the MS Access database, and some advanced power-user features.
However, in the end, I found that Media Center was the my favorite strictly for tagging and organizing these photos. There's alot of value-add features that the others have, areas that MC is lacking. Ideally, I want to pick and choose what tools I use for what task, and when something new comes along, I want to be able to use it without being locked into a particular application, with full access to my image metadata.
That is the reason for this project... extracting the MC metadata tags and transforming them into metadata useable by other applications (most read IPTC fields -- so that's where I'm starting). I'm quite happy with the process for entering the tags in MC, so I don't have much need for the reverse (importing IPTC to MC tags) -- although so far, it looks like I'm in the minority.