Two Utilities to Make Using iPhoto Keywords Easier

Apple’s iPhoto keyword management and assignment has improved over its iterations, but still has room for improvement. Two plug-in utilities, Keyword Assistant and Keyword Manager, make a good job of providing some of that required improvement. Both utilities use text entry of keywords, rather than iPhoto’s checkbox approach, and both can also access your address book, using the names in it as keywords.

I have 2362 unkeyworded photos in my iPhoto so there’s plenty of scope for testing these two utilities. On an aside, the ideal for me would be to be able to keyword photos as they are imported. It seems that once the import has happened it’s too easy to put keywording in the to do basket.

Because of Flickr and the like, which let you go tag happy, iPhoto’s keywording is becoming somewhat limited. It’s based more on an era when you might have had only a couple of dozen keywords. Looking at iPhoto’s keyword window, which is not resizable and only displays 36 keywords, reinforces this. Consequently, it would not be surprising if Apple revamped keywording in iPhoto 07.

Keyword Assistant
Unlike Keyword Manager, which is a full keyword management utility, Keyword Assistant’s sole purpose is to help speed up the assignment of keywords. It began life in an earlier version of iPhoto when it was desperately needed but still makes a significant difference in the latest iPhoto.

Keyword Assistant works with the simplest interface possible, presenting a small (albeit, brushed metal) text box you type the keywords into. Any new keyword will bring a prompt asking if you wish to create it. Multiple keywords can be entered and auto-completion is via the tab key.

My favorite feature of Keyword Assistant is that it remembers the last typed keywords. This makes tagging multiple photos with similar keywords much quicker. However, it doesn’t include keywords applied through iPhoto’s keyword interface. This feature makes it easy to scroll through your photos one-by-one or multi-selecting, adding groups of keywords quite rapidly.

Keyword Manager
I got rather excited when I stumbled across Keyword Manager, as it talked about grouping keywords; however, it does have room for improvement.

Keyword Manager’s keyword assignment differs slightly from Keyword Assistant’s, in that you enter one keyword at a time and press enter to add or auto-complete and add. The text entry area does not build up a string of keywords like Keyword Assistant does, and so doesn’t retain them for easy adding to other photos.

However, Keyword Manager does have a limited group assignment in that a keyword in a sub-group will be automatically assigned to the keywords in its parent hierarchy. Thus, if I set up a keyword “Australia” and have in it a sub-group keyword “Victoria” and then under it have keywords of various locations, such as “Melbourne,” when I enter “Victoria,” Keyword Manager automatically tags the photos with “Australia,” and if I enter “Melbourne,” it automatically tags with the keywords “Australia” and “Victoria.”

This feature is most useful for location and family hierarchies. What it doesn’t allow is duplication or re-use of keywords. For instance, I’d like to add under each state of Australia a keyword group called “Beach,” and under each of those, the locations in my photos that are seaside, but the keyword “Beach” can only appear once. I can appreciate why the developer wouldn’t do this—for example, if I did type “Beach,” it wouldn’t know which state I was referring to—but I still believe it would be useful and could be implemented successfully.

As a full keyword manager, Keyword Manager allows you to add and remove keywords, group keywords, and filter the display of photos by keywords. Its filtering interface leaves iPhoto’s (which although ugly as heck, does do the job), back in the early 1990s.

One other feature some people will find very useful feature is that Keyword Manager has the option to share keywords between all iPhoto libraries.

Overall
Of the two utilities, I found Keyword Assistant gave me the better productivity improvement in assigning keywords, which is my major need and the major reason these utilities exist.

Keyword Manager is a great utility but just lacks a little to justify its cost. Having set itself up to replace iPhoto’s keyword and management totally, it has achieved that and more, but it does need to go a little further and find other ways to speed up the assignment of multiple keywords at once. To justify spending US$19.99, it would need to be the complete package, which it isn’t yet. 8/10

Keyword Assistant, on the other hand, which only has one goal—to speed up keyword assignment—succeeds. Being free and having a simple interface, Keyword Assistant is a must have. Keyword Assistant plus iPhoto’s own keyword management will more than satisfy most users. 9/10