For my purposes, it serves as a catalog of images that are searchable, and the thing that really pushed me to buy it is it when I get back from a trip or outing and have hundreds of images to sift through — top notch workflow for that. I can go through with one keystroke per image: “like it, love it, maybe later, delete, delete, like it” and you can easily embed keywords into the exif data for your images to make them easier to find later. things like: (“San Diego Trip December 2009″ “Nicolas” “Dolphins” “Sea World”)

Nolan

As for your question about in-camera vs. in-software, white balance, you will get at least 2 (maybe more) answers. Depending on the circumstances involved, I may go either way.

When to use in-camera:
1. lighting is predictable / stable
2. camera doesn’t support raw image formats
3. you may need to print without editing (say from a memory card) and without a computer
4. to save yourself time later

When to use on-computer:
1. If the camera’s white balance feature stinks, plan to adjust later.
2. If your camera can shoot in raw mode. (you might still want to set a manual white balance in the scene, but that is optional)
3. You have tricky lighting or mixed lighting — incandescent and flourescent mixed, daylight and incandescent, flash and candle light, etc. or lighting that is changing frequently while you shoot. (partly cloudy day, moving between indoors and out frequently, moving shade, moving subjects)
4. When you mess up and take pictures with the wrong white balance setting on the camera. “drat, I wanted sun icon not the incandescent icon!” (gee, I’ve never done that before

Why would it make a difference?
If you have no raw format, then the only place “all” the data is available is on-camera. After that, the image is jpeg compressed into some transfer color space (sRGB or AdobeRGB, for example), and between that and the jpeg lossy compression, you immediately start losing data. This can sometimes be discernible differences when you start really making adjustments to contrast and lighting in a software package later. Large areas of approximately the same color may turn “flat” and lose all contrast — usually this is most noticable on almost white and almost black areas of the original image that clip at black or white. Sometimes it will show up in saturated colors too, but less often.

hmmm…. this smells like a blog post all its own — there are probably also tons of web sites out that discuss this topic better than I can present it in a comment. If you really would like to see some fake math that pretends to be the manipulations, I can show you sometime.

Nolan