For a long time, my digital life revolved around one computer (or another). It went from a Mac IIx, to a IIfx, to a Quadra 950, to a Powermac 6100/66, then a 7200/120, then for several years, 2002 Powermac G4. At some point in grad school, work got shifted to a IBM Thinkpad and personal stuff stayed on the mac. Things got bifurcated again when I graduated... The Thinkpad (and then the replacement Thinkpad) gets a lot of use at home because you can move them around and most of the time they're all the computer that's needed. However, a few things have kept the mac in regular usage: photography and email archiving. Of course, there are machines that are not really central tools: there is the gaming PC and a home server that lets us centrally backup files, print, and code.
It occurred to me that if I could move the email and the photography to the thinkpad, I could retire the mac. Having all these computers laying around doing highly specific jobs seems silly and redundant, especially since the mac uses massive amounts of electricity (300 watts) to do the same job that the Thinkpad (10-60 watts) can, at something like 1/8th the speed.
The problem is proving to be fairly difficult to overcome. My archive of photos is ~80 gigabyte, and carefully organized using Kavasoft's (mac only) Shoebox. Moving the archive and maintaining the browsability (Shoebox organizes into folders by date, but then assigns metadeta that lets photos be organized by catagory) is proving to be tricky.
Picasa happily indexed the archive, but navigating turned out to be tricky, as it refuses to recurse into folders to display photos. I downloaded the Lightroom 4.1 trial. I really liked using it on the mac, except for the sluggish speed on a comparatively outdated machine. It's better on the E-350 based Thinkpad, but browsing is still less than instantaneous, and I have not yet convinced it to read a Shoebox catalog file.
With no obvious way to move both photo and catagories en-mass, things to be pretty much locked in to the mac for the moment.
I bet you can grep through the catalog file for strings and come up with a pattern relatively quickly. I'd wager they either do string-string linking or string-int linking where the int indexes a master list of tags somewhere.
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