Keyword Manager for iPhoto

Keyword Manager

product

If you’re serious about assigning keywords in iPhoto, and wish there were an easier way of doing it, then Keyword Manager is a must.

★★★★★

Keyword Manager, 19$ or Euros from Bullstorm Software (a couple of Swedish Mac Developers) is, in a nutshell the answer to your iPhoto keywording prayers. As any regular readers of this blog may realise, I’m a bit of a metadata and organisation nut, so any way of speeding up the process of adding this in to your system if welcome.

You may or may not be familiar with the excellent freeware Keyword Assistant, which allows you to assign Keywords in a much more powerful and Hotkey friendly manner than iPhoto offers. Keyword Manager is pretty much Keyword Assistant on steroids, with organisation of keywords and Apple style HUD panels (heads-up display, that transparent black panel you get in the photo adjustments pane in iPhoto for example). It fits into iPhoto like it was made by Apple, and with the latest release of version 1.1, pretty much all of my outstanding wants of this software have been addressed.

What makes Keyword Manager so powerful is the hierarchical organisation of iPhoto keywords which makes assigning multiple keywords an absolute breeze, a feature that comes into it’s own when assigning geographic tags. Take for example this recent photo of London in the snow, shown below, at flickr.

In Keyword Manager I simply assigned it a keyword of “Parkland Walk”, and the keywords “Highgate”, “London”, “England” and “Europe” were automagically assigned to the photo in iPhoto (the keywords came into flickr via FlickrExport for iPhoto). This may be explained a bit better with the screenshot below, showing the hierarchy of keywords in place.

The Keyword Assigner Panel, brought into focus by the Apple-K shortcut

Clearly you have to spend some time setting up and optimising your keywords and keyword structure a bit, which is fairly simple within the Keyword Manager interface, but when done the time saved and repetitiveness eliminated is immeasurable. Imagine pretty much any hierarchy of keywords you might want, say Art>Gallery>Tate>Tate Britain, and it becomes possible. The only thing that isn’t possible, understandably so in my opinion, is keywords being available in more than one hierarchy. So, in the example of Tate Britain above, that hierarchy AND Art>Galleries>Tate etc. would not be possible, as Tate would exist in more than one hierarchy.

Beyond the hierarchical organisation of keywords, there are other time-saving features in Keyword Manager too. Auto-completion of keywords saves keystrokes, alpha organisation means you can find a keyword to edit it in Keyword Manager fairly quickly, and the hotkeys (Apple-K brings up the assigner panel, while Apple-L brings up the Keyword Organisation panel) help to speed things up even more. Both panels are also available in full screen mode, allowing for full screen editing and keyword management simultaneously.

The Keyword Organiser panel – keywords can even be categorised from here, as a location, country, person or similar. New keywords can be created and deleted too, and the panel shown has a filter applied, showing all photos in Europe but not in Switzerland or Scotland.

So why bother keywording? I’m rapidly approaching 4000 photos in iPhoto now (that’s after trimming poor shots too), so being able to drill down through them quickly and easily gives a really powerful way of searching through photos, other than my data attached to the image by the camera, such as date taken. With proper keywording I can easily look for photos of both me and my girlfriend, taken in Europe, but not in the UK, as an example. The problem of finding and viewing old photos will only grow as my Library grows, so taking steps to combat that problem now means that in a year or two, I won’t be left with a mammoth categorisation task (which I’d probably never attempt). Keyword Manager therefore becomes indispensable.

In conclusion, if you like assigning keywords in iPhoto, and wish there were an easier way of doing it, then Keyword Manager is a must. My iPhoto library is growing at a rate of knots and finding photos is becoming increasingly more impossible, so keyword assigning becomes increasingly more important and the best way of doing this has to be Keyword Manager.