What you’re asking is a hell of automation and it can’t be done “just” like that.

I suggest you try to make a combination of Automator and Smart Albums on iPhoto. Things you want to know about iTunes: EXIF is not preserved when Synced to iPhone through iTunes which is part of your requirements.

You could use a Smart Album in iPhoto and Flag the pictures you want to transfer then create another Smart Album with those flagged pictures and only transfer those (or vice versa). Use Keywords to your advantage. Consider a nice app like Keyword Manager for iPhoto to help you with that.

I have no idea why iPhoto makes you nervous, but you should be pointing at iTunes for that…

iPhoto is perfectly suitable for picture maintenance and sorting. You can later use automator to resize them and do fancy things (even tagging!). The same can be said about Aperture.

Your workflow should be, download to iPhoto automatically. Classify, Tag, Delete Bad ones, Adjust, Edit, and transfer to your devices for later viewing (and backup). If you just want to have a backup up of what you do, let Time Machine do it’s work with your iPhoto Library or add another step, use Image Import (or Cameras) to organize, then add to iPhoto for treatment and later transfer to your device(s). The original imported folder will be untouched and, eventually backed up by Time Machine too.

Pixelpipe

From https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/3486/is-there-a-way-to-upload-higher-resolution-videos-to-youtube-or-any-video-sharin

This free app allows iPhone 4 users to directly upload their 720P videos to YouTube, as well as Flickr, Facebook, MobileMe, Viddler, Posterous and a whole slew of other video sharing sites. The app evens works via email and FTP. The only caveat is that the videos cannot be over 200 MB in size.

Regarding with how to use it, check out this post: http://islandinthenet.com/2010/07/06/pixelpipe-upload-720p-hd-video-from-iphone-4-to-youtube/ I recommend that post, it gives some great information on the app and how it is used.

For example:

A “pipe” is the connector between the PixelPipe app and one or more destination sites where you want your content to be uploaded. For example, I set up pipes for flickr, picasa, and Dropbox and many others.

I setup some of my pipes as default routes. This means that any media I select to upload will automatically go to these default pipes.

For each pipe I created, PixelPipe created a routing tag. The routing tag explicitly tells PixelPipe where to upload the content overriding any default routes. If you want your content routed to different photo sets you can create a routing pipe and tag for each one.

Also, given this:

since other developers are sure to create a similar product now that they know it is possible to upload 720p videos.

If you don't like the PixelPipe app, it shouldn't be too long before another solution pops up :)

According to this page, an app called SmugMug is also 720p uploading enabled, however I couldn't find much in reference to that on their site. http://www.tuaw.com/2010/07/01/want-to-upload-720p-from-iphone-4-try-pixelpipe/