iPhoto is PISSING ME OFF

Right now I am in some sort of wierd computer/gadget hell.

Right now I really really hate both my iPod and the iPhoto that came with the iBook.

Who in God's name thought it would be a good idea to AUTOMATICALLY assign organization of all the photos you put into iPhoto by year? So here I am having spent the majority of a day getting my *&^% iPod to upload over 7000 pictures from the old Windows based pc (which does not have USB 2 so it was slower than shit), then I get them on the new iBook (faster as it DOES have USB2) and fucking iPhoto takes all my pictures, shakes them up and then randomly assigns them into new folders.

Folders I don't understand.
Folders that have NOTHING in common with my painstakingly organized system that Windows easily allowed me to create.
Folders that are dated 1997-2005, then when you open one of those, the folders are titled "1", "2", "3". and so on.

So you open THOSE folders and they have yet more numbers as titles. And, as I never had time to NAME all 7000 photos, the fact that iphoto won't let me see thumbnails of whatever is in its stupid little assigned folders is just about ready to drive me over the bend. Cuz, yeah, I know what 86732be53.jpg looks like. FUCK!

A guy at the Mac store told me to re-load the photos onto the iBook, this time avoiding iPhoto. So I did that, and it STILL assigned everything into photos by dates. GAH! What the hell am I missing? How do I fix this? How many hours am I going to waste on this shit?

And the iPod keeps leaving these HUGE cache files on the old windows system whenever I upload the phtos to it, which almost crashed the computer as it used almost 8 gigs of hard drive space with the cache. What is up with that? I was going mental trying to figure out where all my hard drive space had gone. I knew I hadn't used it.

Does Apple hate me? Can anyone tell me how to NOT have iPhoto totally gank my whole photo filing system?