> Yet a lot of counterexamples you bring up sound like personal experience. If it's not Spotlight, then where are you getting some of this stuff?

No, I have nearly no personal experience with DAMs, I am just making what I hope are reasonable assumptions about how they work - for instance, that you need to launch a program to use them.

> I can't argue that. Mind you, you'll be navigating to the directory where the image is anyway when you click "choose", so I'm not certain what the difference is.

The difference is that in one case I navigate to the directory, in the other I open up my DAM, find the image, find out its location in the file system, and THEN navigate to it. It adds quite a bit of overhead.

I can think of several workarounds for this (other than integrating it tightly into the OS). For instance, creating a virtual filesystem out of the keywords and such. I've not heard of anyone doing such a thing though. (And why do so many modern OSes make it such a pain in the ass to extend the filesystem? I miss my Amiga.)