iPhoto works fine.
The facility to burn a CD within the application is NOT intended to
create a CD for output to a print service ... the Help does not make
that clear. It is intended as a way to archive your photos for
iPhoto's use, so it retains all of the (rather overly complex) iPhoto
database directory structure.
The correct way to make a CD to bring to a printer is to select all
the photos you want to send and use the Export command to write them
to a folder. Then you exit iPhoto, stick in a blank CD ... The Finder
mounts a virtual disk image, you drag your folder to it and say burn.
A few minutes later, you have a CD which is 100% Mac OS and Windows
compatible with a folder full of properly named JPEG image files.
That's what you should tell your computer noob clients, and show them
how to do it if you can. It will make your life a lot easier.
Regards other, low-cost solutions for image editing/management on Mac
OS X ... There are quite a few, but all of them are more complex to
understand and use. There are several in the shareware/freeware
domain, a number of commercial products. Go take a look at http://
www.versiontracker.com/macosx/ and search on "photo", "photo edit",
"image catalog" etc.
But iPhoto does a lot for the noob, does it well, is easy to use, and
costs nothing. It's not a photo enthusiast's tool of choice.
Godfrey
