Stonewall

Wikipedia has a fascinating (and rather long) depiction of the Stonewall riots, which happened 40 years ago.  It's worth a read.

How to quickly tear through piles of photos?

I'm starting to take a look at my volumes of photos from the trip. 

I have 11500 of them to go through.  I want to quickly find the best ones, make minor adjustments (cropping, rotating, brightness/color balance etc), and then add titles, descriptions, and tags.  It's got to be quick because I'm going to be doing it over and over and over and over again.

My ultimate goal is to have my photos as a big searchable database both on my desktop and online (flickr or equivalent).  I'm going to create a few slideshows for people to check out. 

I watched the demo videos of iPhoto '09, which appears to be a big jump over my current iphoto ('07), but I have to buy it as an $80 software package included in iLife.  Before I do that, I thought I'd put the call out to see what you photomongers recommend.  How does the newest version of Picasa compare?  Also, is there a better place than flickr at this point for navigating large photo collections online?

I also am planning a project of interesting photo pairs, showing two images from different parts of the world that either have a lot in common or provide interesting contrast.  I'll likely have to assemble the pairs somewhat more manually.

Content aware scaling is commercial

It turns out that one of the most impressive tech demos from Siggraph 2007 is already in Photoshop CS4.

Content-aware scaling lets you resize photos without cropping or stretching. Instead, It just compresses the least interesting parts of the image. 

Confused?

Check out this video (skipping the first minute if you don't want the backstory)