[geeks] Quick Photo Manipulation Program

[Joshua Boyd]

Does any one have a suggestion for a program that would excel at  
opening photos and cropping, scaling, and rotating them on OSX?   
Preferably a gui program, not cli.  And it needs to be fairly fast,  
and not try to take over managing my photos.  Free is fairly highly  
prefered.

A few answers that I don't consider acceptable are:
Photoshop (full or elements)
PaintShop Pro
Gimp
iPhoto

Photoshop and Gimp aren't fast enough (I don't want to wait several  
minutes just to rotate/scale/crop), I don't want PSP, and iPhoto  
insists on loading everything into it's library.

I've spent a little time looking, but I can't seem to find anything  
that is clearly right.  I suppose I could try the demo of pixelmator,  
but is seems a shame to spend $60 for such a simple task.

I do have a core image card, although hopefully such wouldn't really  
be required.