OS X V10.6 Snow Leopard :: Cross-reference Photo Folders?

My photos are organized in folders according to the week they were taken, and I want to keep it that way. But if I want to pull up just the photos that have my friend Brian in them, how can I do that? First off iPhoto is NOT an option. I have used several versions of the iLife suite starting with Tiger, then moving on to Leopard and (currently) Snow Leopard. And the whole iLife suite is riddled with bugs to the point where I do not want to touch them as they are completely unreliable. DVD player crashes and freezes randomly, and falsely claims DVDs are damaged when they are brand new. Now I just use VLC, and my DVD movies play perfectly every time. Something I could almost never get DVD Player to do.

I have tried using iWeb, but after a few "undos" and some editing, my links no longer work, and files get dropped for no reason. I have tried tagging photos in iPhoto, and using one Smart Folder for each tagged category. It all works great for a while, but before long, newly tagged photos stop being added into the Smart Folders, and it defeats the whole purpose. Not to mention that iPhoto creates a huge file, and wastes time identifying faces, which is an undesirable feature I can't seem to turn off. I am guessing the whole problem with the iLife suit is that the library coding gets super easily corrupted if you make changes (and I am not even touching any of the files outside of iPhoto, iWeb, etc.) I can't even make aliases to the folders and organize them that way for viewing in screensaver, because Snow Leopard's screen saver can't open the photos in an alias folder. I'm NOT going to duplicate all my folders with different names and arrange them by category. That isn't organizing, that is duplicating, and completely wasting tons of file space. Is there any program available I can get to replace iPhoto so I can cross-reference my photos into multiple categories? And is there a screen saver program I can use to make my own screen savers that can pull files from aliases, or some other referencing system? 

Is there a patch I can get so that the default screensaver will open photos from an alias in Snow Leopard, the way it always used to? Why is it so difficult to deal with what should be simple, basic programs and file organization? I love my MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard, and I love the professional programs I run on it such as Adobe and Maya, but why is the first party software complete garbage? I know I don't sound like it at the moment, but I'm normally a polite person, I am just really frustrated right now. Just tired of banging my head trying to find ways to get around and outsmart the default programs on this OS, which has been futile, I might add.

Info:
13" MacBook Pro 8GB RAM 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, iMacG5 with iSight 2.5 GB RAM