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.
Hello, I am Melvin Rivera; creator of 
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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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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).
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?
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
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!!
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 ??