Is there a photo manager for geeks?

Question

Photo

Inspired by the Ledger financial tracking software , I wondered if there was some kind of photo manager for geeks?
Now I use iPhoto, and I do not quite like its proprietary database format, in which it is difficult to find something using the file manager - you have to launch iPhoto every time.
As I see the photo manager for myself: several folders (originals, tags, events, people), in them there are subfolders-views (for example, tags/cats/) and in these subfolders there are symlinks (regular symlinks) to files. Well, the command line interface for this case: ololo tag котики IMG_2515.JPG
Is there something similar?