Tagging iPhoto
Posted on Tuesday, March 7th, 2006 at 4:58 pm under Mac Geekery, Tutorials.
Most people I know don’t know that iPhoto can be tagged with keywords. Or if they do they don’t know how to use them. They’re not to blame, iPhoto has always had an awkward implementation of keywords. iPhoto 06 improves on keywords but they are still confusing to most users I know. So here’s a quick tutorial on setting up and managing keywords in iPhoto. This tutorial uses iPhoto 06, but it can be implemented in earlier versions that support keywords.
Step 1: Setting Up Keywords
From the Apple Menu Items select ‘iPhoto > Preferences’ and go to the Keywords tab. As you will notice, iPhoto comes with some predefined keywords to get you started. Edit, delete or add keywords at will according to your needs. In this example I will be tagging my vacation pictures with the word “Vacation” and will also add my wife’s name “Lilia” on the pictures she’s in.
Step 2: Tagging Pictures
There are two ways to tag a picture. My favorite way of tagging is to drag a picture to the keyword itself. To do this, click the Key icon on the bottom left. This will show you the available keywords. Now drag a photo, a collection of photos or an album into a keyword to tag the pictures with that keyword. This panel is where most people get confused. If you drag pictures to the keywords it sets the keywords to those pictures. But if you select the keywords it changes the displayed pictures and shows you only pictures in your library with that picture.
Alternatively, you can select an image and add keywords to it from from the Info panel ( Command + I ). But this requires managing a separate window and I’m not a fan of that.
Step 3: Put the keyword to use
So what kind of things can I do with keywords? I can create an album from my 2005 vacations that have my wife Lilia on it. To do this, from iPhoto I select ‘File > New Smart Album’ and add all the rules I want my album to use. In this example I set the keyword to ‘Vacation’, another keyword to ‘Lilia’, and the date range for 2005. Once created, the album will show up in my album list. Remember this is a smart album. I can not drag photos into it, it will automatically update itself based on the rules I created.
Once keywords are set, they are available in the iPhoto search results. Use the search fields at the bottom right of iPhoto and hit the return key. This will search your iPhoto library for any words in the title, description or keywords. To make keywords viewable while browsing the photo library, from the menu bar I selected ‘View > Keywords’.
Keywords are also searchable with Mac OS X’s Spotlight, available in the Tiger update. This means you can search for your keywords from Mac OS X without even launching iPhoto.
Conclusion
Tagging photos with Keywords is a very easy way to manage the ever expanding digital life we’re embracing every time we take a picture. Writing titles and descriptions on every photo of my 8,000 photo library is not a realistic task but bulk tagging, now that’s a noble idea.
Mar 8th, 2006 at 6:44 am
Ken Ferry has created a great little plug-in for iPhoto called Keyword Assistant.
The main feature is an auto-completing text field for assigning keywords.
This is much faster than using the built-in keyword panel and very intuitive.
This is really how keywords should have been implemented!
Mar 8th, 2006 at 9:53 am
i do like that plugin a lot. but since now i can drag and drop, i use the built in method more than the keyword assistant plugin.
Mar 8th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
I was going to link keyword assistant too, but I was beaten to it. Seriously, for tagging multiple photos with multiple keywords, this has to be quicker? Then again, I have never tried the drag and drop method, so thanks for the heads up.
Mar 9th, 2006 at 10:22 am
I have been tagging since iPhoto 04. The problem i have discovered when I upgraded to iLife 06 is that after upgrading, your keywords gets all messed up. I have a DVD backup that I’ve made prior to upgrading, and when I popped in the DVD to the iPhoto 06, the keywords all showed up wrong and your old keywords do not get transferred at all. This problem did not happened when i upgraded from iPhoto 04 to 05. It is very frustrating with now every keyword tag is wrong and i have to manually update everyone (about 5000+ photos).
Mar 9th, 2006 at 11:42 am
Since my main use of keywords in iPhoto is for adding tags to be exported to Flickr, I find Keyword Assistant valuable. Dragging and dropping looks like it would work for a limited set of keywords, but when you start expanding the universe of keywords, it’s very slow to go through and find the one you need.
Mar 9th, 2006 at 4:22 pm
A couple of things the people should know about keywords. 1) They are not written to the original photo but instead to a copy that iPhoto makes. 2) I don’t know what format iphoto uses but if your photos are already tagged with IPTC tags, iPhoto will import them. Therefore, a better way to manage your photos is to use something like Adobe bridge to tag the originals and import them into iPhoto with the option to leave the original photos in place. After all your photos will hopefully have a longer lifespan than any software package that you use to manage them.
Mar 10th, 2006 at 12:11 am
The keyword functionality is still fairly limited though, as it does not allow for nesting keywords. Let’s say that you would have the possibility to have something like : Nature > Wood > Trees > Pine Tree. By selecting the keyword Pine Tree, all 4 keywords would be applied. I would find this a very nice feature, specially if iPhoto was also coming with a nice controlled vocabulary list.
Mar 10th, 2006 at 7:20 am
Great summary! I stumbled across the process of drag-the-photos-to-the-keyword, which at first seemed backwards, but now that I know it, it’s great!
I was wondering why my keywords didn’t show up in spotlight, and I found this helpful tip on Mac OSX hints: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050516022840448
I have over 4000 photos and the above trick took less than 30 seconds.
Worked like a champ, and now those keywords are really paying off!
Mar 10th, 2006 at 12:55 pm
Check out Keyword Assitant.
http://homepage.mac.com/kenferry/software.html
It is the easiest way to create and apply keywords to photos in iPHoto.
Mar 11th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
Hmm, Lee’s redundant comment gets accepted but the one I left here the other day was rejected? And now I can’t even use a valid disposable e-mail address, like on other blogs I’ve left comments on. I didn’t realize this blog was going to be censored with such extreme prejudice. Certainly an uninviting first impression, Melvin.
Mar 11th, 2006 at 11:41 pm
my server swicthed boxes this week. it could have been that the message got lost in the transition of servers and dns switching. or that your message sounded like spam. since i do get a lot of spam, sometimes legit ones get mistaken for spam. i rarely censor comments. feel free to re-submit your comment and don’t be so quick to judge.
Mar 12th, 2006 at 2:06 pm
Thanks for the explanation, Melvin. I wasn’t intending to judge, just vent some frustration of what my first experience here had *seemed* like. Sorry for posting a harsh, assuming overreaction. I’m surprised you didn’t censor it since I was expecting (even hoping) you would. :-)
Now I see how a series of unfortunate mistimings unfolded, including emotional exacerbation from my iMac suddenly powering off shortly after posting my original comment. The system’s going in for repair in a bit (again, sigh) since it won’t stay powered up long enough to run AHT even once.
I’d be relieved if we could just rewind and forget this misunderstanding with no hard feelings. I’ll resubmit the original comment after this one (it sure didn’t sound like spam to me :-)), and feel free to remove this little subthread entirely. Btw, there’s at least one other comment I read that’s no longer here which may have been a victim of the server transition.
Mar 12th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
Just last night my wife mentioned how she’d like to better organize her photos in iPhoto so this tutorial couldn’t have come at a better time. I’m sure she’ll appreciate your gentle, low-tech explanations more than my tech-flavored attempts to describe the same things to her. Thanks!
Mar 14th, 2006 at 11:24 am
i spent a long time tagging my 1000 photos from kauai. it took me about a weeks time after work in the evenings. well one day my iPhotos library decided to corupt on me. in a panic i check finder to make sure all my photos were still there. that was the good news. as for the bad: i was unable to salvage my iPhoto library file and completely lost all of my tags. it was only after i reimported all my photos back into iPhoto, creating a new library file, that i realized the bad news. tags are not stored in photos but in the library file!!! I lost all my work/tags/time!!
i haven’t thought of retagging. i cant stand to thing of losing all my work again.
come on apple. this is an easy fix!
Mar 17th, 2006 at 1:49 pm
Here’s hoping Apple goes with IPTC keyword tags in iLife 07 – they’re stored in the picture, so a bad database won’t destroy the thousands of tags you have attached to the images in your library, and they’re a standard, so they work even when you mail the photos to a friend.
Apr 17th, 2006 at 11:41 am
It is strange that iPhoto went for this double functionnality for the tags. One way you filter, the other you tag. It is not very user friendly and is defnitely bound to introduce some confusion. We ran into similar issues when deciding how to allow people to interact with tags on our project, and keeping a consistant behavior ended up being the best solution.
Also taggind by drag and dropping (like it’s done on photoshop elements) ends up requiring a lot of mouse moves. I realized that making it “check box style” would be a better way of going: you basically click on a pick to select it and then click on all the tags you want to attach to it, and that’s it. It would be much more time-effective (but not as fancy looking).
Apr 17th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
Why is tagging on my computer a drag?
I have been into tagging for a while now. No need to explain the motivation, it is just a great way to have your pictures organized and it makes retrieval very easy. Like a lot of people i got
Jul 20th, 2006 at 8:27 am
I love the keywording feature, but was very frustrated to learn that if you share your library over a local network, the other computers accessing your shared library can’t search using the keywords on the host machine. So much for a central photo server using iTunes.
Any suggestions?
Sep 11th, 2006 at 11:24 pm
hey everyone, don’t no if you will be able to help me but if you can it would be GREAT! i just recently spent an entire afternoon adding all my photos into iPHOTO with albums ect. Problem is… i then downloaded iPHOTO6 of the apple site and when i went back into iPHOTO all my pictures were gone!! *tear* I don’t no how to get them back. Does anyone know how? Thank you
Sep 29th, 2006 at 1:52 pm
Hi….
is it possible to tell to iPhoto that all my pics are under a desired directory? I mean, i always store my pics under /data/photos, and i’d like iPhoto to look into it, but i don’t know how to do it, it seems, that iPhoto uses its own working directory, and opossite to iTunes, i can’t change it from preferences menu….
Thanks in advance!!
Jul 5th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
I want to use iPhoto, but tagging just doesn’t offer enough structure for me. Instead I have to use the Canon ImageBrowser that shipped with my camera. I’m not usually a luddite, but I just can’t get beyond having hierarchial folders for photos:
2004
–Family
—-Event 1
—-Event 2
–Vacations
—-Destiation 1
—-Destination2
I can’t see how to make this work with keywords. Each time I have a new event or a new destination, I need to have a new keyword. Already I’d have a list of about 100 keywords and that would be messy.
IMHPO, iPhoto keywords need to be metadata in the photo file, and used by Spotlight. You type them in free text, batch-wise if required, and autocomplete helps you reuse keywords so that you don’t invent new ones when existing ones are available. I’m going to check out the Keyword Assistant – perhaps that it is ??
Aug 28th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Steve, your comment nails my biggest two issues with iPhoto. If I have already entered keywords for about 6K photos in iPhoto, does anyone know of an add-on that will take those keywords (and dates for that matter) and write it to the file metadata?