Apple's Aperture photo editing software has a lot of nice features, one of the best perhaps being its ability to let you save your photo and edits to a backup device in a simple and efficient way. You define a vault for your photos, and every now and then just press a button and that's it. Everything kept safe and sound in your external backup drive.

iPhoto is a nice piece of 'free' software that comes with your mac, and works generally pretty well for listing all your photos in a smart way, tweaking things like contrast to make them look a bit more like pro photos, etc.

But eventually you realise it's just not enough. If you take photos at all seriously, you will need to tweak them in ways that iPhoto can't cope with.