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.
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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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.