In Aperture, you can create and maintain as many separate and independent photo libraries as you wish. You can house and access these autonomous libraries from any location in your computer. These individual libraries can also be wedged in any of your internal hard drives as well as external networked or mapped drives (wired or not).

In Leopard, however, if you maintain several Aperture libraries, you can access, view and use only the photos from the currently loaded Aperture library. At any one time, the photographs of the currently loaded library are the only ones that are available and accessible from within all of the iLife and iWorks applications, and also including Mail, through a universal media viewer pane built into these various applications. Not any of the other Aperture libraries can be viewed and accessed.

If you want to access photos from your other libraries, you will need to first fire up Aperture, go to the application's Preferences pane, point it to a new library, and then restart Aperture. If you've been through this process several times, you know that it can be both tedious and time-consuming.

Now, there is a way for you to be able to access all the images in all of your Aperture libraries all the time, without the need to switch Aperture's Library.

You can use a free 3rd-party application from Karelia Software called iMedia Browser. This media browser has the ability to show all available Aperture libraries that may be anywhere within the computer's internal hard drive. And, you can browse, view and use (drag-and-drop) any of the images to any of the iLife, iWork, Mail, and many 3rd-party applications. If, however, you have Aperture libraries in external or networked drives, iMedia Browser doesn't seem to be able to show these in the source media list.

Just like the media source list in Leopard, the media types that can be shown in iMedia Browser are categorized into: Photos, Audio, and Movies, but with the addition of Internet Links. But unlike Leopard's media source list, each category includes media from various sources. For example, in Photos, other than the images from iPhoto and Aperture, it can also show photographs from all other photo applications stored within the Pictures Folders. It can also show images from various folders not shown in Leopard's media browser such as the User Pictures, Desktop Pictures, Screen Savers, and iChat Icons.

In the Audio category, it can show music from iTunes, GarageBand, Music Folder, iLife Sound Effects, iMovie Sound Effects, as well as anything from the Music Folder and Sounds Folder. From the Movies category, the ones displayed are those from iTunes, Movie Folder and others.

In iMedia Browser, you have the ability to resize thumbnail photos, and your projects are properly labeled and images meticulously keyworded, you can do a quick and easy search. Access to iMedia Browser software can be from the dock or status bar.

I first discovered IMedia Browser when I updated an amazing 3rd-party application called Podcast Maker (which is currently on its 1.3.6 version). Podcast Maker is a podcast creation and publishing software from Lemonz Dream. Built into the new version of Podcast Maker is the iMedia browser. It acts as a helper application similar to the standard media viewer embedded into the applications of iLife and iWorks. While primarily created for Sandvox, other 3rd-party applications are also using the iMedia framework such as Posterino (Xykloid), Norkross Movie (Norkross Software), Skitch (Plasq), MemoryMiner (GroupSmarts), Ubercaster (Pleasant Software), iStar Composer (Script Software), and more. Interested developers can freely download the framework from the company's website.

iMedia browser is an extensible component that allows browsing of multiple media types. End users such as photographers can download and install it as a free stand-alone universal media viewer from their website. iMedia Browser is based on codes originally developed by Jason Terhorst, and further developed for Sandvox by Greg Hulands, Dan Wood, and Terrace Talbot, with contributions from Matt Gough, Martin Wennerberg, and others (who are credited in the source file). It also makes use of separately available components such as MUPhotoView by Blake Seely, RBSplitView and Flipr by Rainer Brockerhoff, and UKKQueue by M. Uli Kusterer.

French, Deutsch, Dansk, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Swedish and other localization of this applicaiton are available. iMedia Browser can be licensed for free use almost without any conditions.