A good (and inexpensive) images manager for Mac?
Solution 1:
Well, you could try some sort of "anything bucket" like DevonThink or Yojimbo, as those should be pretty capable of handling the search and metadata parts, but I think those might be tad bit overkill if you only want to use it for images.
I am not sure how powerful the image managing part is, as I mostly use the conversion and editing tools, but GraphicConverter has some image managing parts built into it and might be worth a try:
http://www.lemkesoft.com/content/188/graphicconverter.html
As I said, it mostly is a conversion and light editing tool, but since it is an old-school shareware program, you can try it out for free to see if it suits your taste. In that case, I would recommend trying out both version 6 and 7, as 7 was a complete rewrite and as far as I know has not yet full feature parity with the older version.