Tagging iPhoto

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.