“ince Apple developed its ‘digital hub’, with iLife and now iWork, I have wanted to have a system-wide panel that would let me choose pictures from my iPhoto library without having to open the application. For example, if I want to add a picture to a TextEdit RTFD document, I had to launch iPhoto, chose the picture, and drag it to the document. Waiting for iPhoto to launch can be long if you have a lot of photos. But there is a way to get around this, using an Automator action.” (Thanks Daring Fireball!)
Link:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060429075843216
