Dealing with the Inconsistency of Keywords Case Sensitivity in Photos for Mac
As noted in this discussion photos keywords case sensitivity by CasaJ, keywords are case sensitive when assigned to a photo, also in Smart Albums, but not, when used from the search field. So we can have duplicate keywords, differing only in the case of the letters, which makes it tricky to use them in Smart albums together with other constraints.
But we cannot simply merge the keywords by renaming them in the Keyword Manager, if they only differ in the case of a few letters.
I am using this work-around to fix keywords with the wrong lower case or upper case:
- First I create a smart album with all photos that have either of the keywords that need to be fixed.
File > New Smart album: - Then I assign a new keyword "Dummy" to all photos in this smart album by selecting all at once with ⌘A and opening the Info panel with ⌘I. Then I type in the Dummy keyword.
- Now I open the Keyword Manager window (with ⌘K), click "Edit keywords", and delete both wrong versions of the keyword, to remove them completely from all photos and the list of keywords.
- Then I assign the a new, correctly spelled keyword to all photos in the Dummy smart album and delete the Dummy keyword as well.
This will work in all cases, where the incorrectly spelled keyword is not embedded in the EXIF tags of the original image files. If the keywords with bad spelling are in the EXIF tags of the imported image files, they have to be removed from the original files with exiftool (http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/) or some other tool, that can edit EXIF tags.
I had accidentally written incorrectly spelled keywords to the original files while I have been using Aperture, and those typos have been migrated to Photos. when I am seeing such a wrong keyword, I have to export the photo and to fix it outside Photos, hen reimport it without the offending keywords embedded in the EXIF.
