What I'd *really* like would be a tool that only keeps the original, and as many versions as I like of "manipulation history scripts" to generate modified versions with my favorite image editing tool. If one day I want to generate a new copy, or come back on an old picture when I find out a new trick that seems to do a better job at something I was trying to achieve, then I can do it easily, and without adding yet another tens-of-megabytes file to my hard drive (yes, potentially at the cost of looking at a hourglass icon for a few minutes...).
While I have not used it, my understanding of Aperture is that it does something along these lines. The original image is never, under any circumstances, altered. All adjustments are CoreImage manipulations that are written to a database (probably using SQLite via the CoreData APIs introduced in 10.4) as different "versions" of the image, allowing non-destructive editing while conserving disk space.
Assuming you have hardware that can run Aperture, I imagine performance is pretty good because all of the CoreImage manipulations are done by the GPU.
Daniel J. Wilson http://blog.wilsonet.com
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