Why does iPhoto crop pictures?

I am sick fed up with programs which decide what I want to do with my pictures. I have some photo's which have information right to the edge and I wish this information to be shown, but iPhoto decides that I don't need it. I have tried cropping the picture every way I can think of, using the cropping tool, but still, when the image is placed, iPhoto crops it again.

The other thing is - why does it decide to juggle the pictures around? I see a nice layout and find a picture that will fit the shape and style of the page, drop it onto the appropriate placeholder and - poof - iPhoto reorders the page layout so that a portrate picture that I was dropping into a portrate frame - now appears in a landscape placeholder (all nicely chopped the wrong way) and in a completely different layout from the original.

iPhoto is just SO frustrating.

I spent hours on a family photo book. One picture needed cropped, so I went and cropped it. As I clicked DONE - the program crashed and I got a bit miffed, but then I thought that everything would have been left the way it was just prior to my cropping operation - you can imagine my horror when, after opening up iPhoto again, all my hours of work were gone. I read this forum and discovered others who had the same trouble and the solution was given to delete the plist file and also rebuild the library. I tried this and it has worked - so far - but WHY was this necessary in the first place??

I wonder how many more people have lost all their valuable time because of this problem and is there not a way of warning people that they have to do this before it happens?