Issues I have with photo management so far:
-- Inability to read/write exif tags ~ standard fields like date acquired, camera, manufacturer, shutter, exposure, etc. Some people find these fields useful. They're in the files - why not use them?
-- Inability to reorientate photos according to exif orientation, and not resetting this field when images are rotated in MC
-- Not enough control over display of thumbnails (not a big one for me, but some control would still be useful)
-- Personally, I hate the way MC automatically assigns a date to the album field. I use my own album titles and find this behaviour really annoying.
A bit of feedback on using current system: I use custom fields to organise by time, people, event, place (country, city, suburb, place, subplace) and photo source. This system works ok for me but is useless for people I share photos with. They either do not use MC or if they do don't have the same custom fields. Custom tags are great for ME on MY computer, but most people I share photos with don't use MC (crazy I know) so the data is essentially inscrutable to them. Some standardisation wouldn't go astray. Get people to submit fields they find useful and incorporate them into the program. This would make photo sharing a helluva lot easier and data wouldn't be lost or duplicated.
The only other thing I'd be interested that would be useful in photo management is having MC recognise how many values are in a list field. This would help a lot in organising by people (without having to make a separate "# of people" field). Not a biggie, but would be useful nonetheless.
I'm not particularly interested in actually editing photos in MC (although the rotate function is handy) ~ I have plenty of fully featured programs for that. If this is a direction you intend to travel down, make sure it's done well!
EDIT: Just reread this, and it sounds really negative
It wasn't meant to! MC is still a lot better than a lot of the alternatives for image organisation, but is just missing a few features that seem like givens to me. Keep up the good work, and please don't forget about those of us who use MC for video, images and documents as well as music!