I, too, am an inexperienced Palm user, bought my Z22 a week ago and mostly love it, but I had a heck of a time syncing my Mac address book with the Palm desktop software. I managed to get all my Mac addresses into the Palm desktop address book by adding the Palm into Mac iSync, and then all 250 addresses merrily appeared in my cute little Z22.
Then, I ran into problems. I made a new Palm address book to manually type in a lot of offline addresses, tried to merge that with the file, but my Palm just would not recoginze it. In the end I said 'screw it,' saved all the existng email addresses to a backup CD, reinstalled the Palm software and took Mac's iSync feature out of the loop. That did the trick. My Palm and Palm desktop files are merrily hotsyncing back and forth and I am re-entering all my data into one big file, which is really all I got the darned thing for in the first place. The Mac iSync feature seemed to be getting in the way.
One thing though I have found, although my Palm files are all up to date and in perfect sync, my iCal and Mac address books are not recognizing any of the new data, so maybe I will need to put the Palm back into iSync to back this up once in a while, while I rely on the Palm Hotsync software to keep handheld and desktop files in line. That's how I understand it, at least, unless I'm missing something?
As for your photo question: it's easy to get photos from a Mac into the Palm, using a drag and drop icon in the Palm application (I keep an alias of this tol on my desktop toolbar), but the identity icons in the Mac address book don't automatically transfer to the Palm with the address files. At least they did not for me. When the mood takes me, I've assigned new ones to addresses on my Palm using the photos on my Palm.
Bottom line: the Z22 will sync with your Mac, it could be a little easier, but the gadget's functionality and overall cuteness outweigh this inconvenience.