Advice on cleaning up keywords in large photo library
Over the years, I've amassed a large library of stock images (more than 150,000) and decided it was time to add them to iPhoto to make them more easily available. About a month ago, I created a new library named "iPhoto Stock" and started importing. I figured that since iPhoto can handle 250,000 images, 150,000 would be a cinch.
Well, I finished a week ago and now iPhoto is too sluggish to use, plus it refuses to Quit, I have to force-quit every time. I've rebuilt the preferences and thumbnails using the Apple + Option keys and that hasn't helped. If I change the default iPhoto library to the other, much smaller library that has my personal photos (about 8K images), everything runs sweet, so it's definitely something in the stock photo library that causing the trouble.
Part of the problem is being caused by the keywords database being so large. Practically every stock image had multiple keywords. Sometimes, if they were correctly formatted to begin with, iPhoto imported them properly, but far more often the stock photo vendor assigned tags like this:
close-up,closeup,fruit,water,slice,color,apple,red
close-up,closeup,fruit,water,color,banana,yellow
And iPhoto imported them as one long keyword. There are thousands of these.
What's the best way to proceed at this point? Should I try to streamline the keywords? I haven't worked with keywords before, if I'm patient and break up the long text strings into individual keywords, will those long keywords automatically disappear if no photos are using them? If so, eventually the database will shrink to where it should be more sprightly.
The other alternative I can think of is to start over again. Rather than re-import from CDs and DVDs, I was thinking about clearing out the current stock library but keep the photos in the folders as they are. I could then import the images from the iPhoto directories by events, cleaning up the keywords as I go. I'm worried that doing it that way will lose the Event titles and I'd like to keep them rather than have the images randomly organized.
Well, I finished a week ago and now iPhoto is too sluggish to use, plus it refuses to Quit, I have to force-quit every time. I've rebuilt the preferences and thumbnails using the Apple + Option keys and that hasn't helped. If I change the default iPhoto library to the other, much smaller library that has my personal photos (about 8K images), everything runs sweet, so it's definitely something in the stock photo library that causing the trouble.
Part of the problem is being caused by the keywords database being so large. Practically every stock image had multiple keywords. Sometimes, if they were correctly formatted to begin with, iPhoto imported them properly, but far more often the stock photo vendor assigned tags like this:
close-up,closeup,fruit,water,slice,color,apple,red
close-up,closeup,fruit,water,color,banana,yellow
And iPhoto imported them as one long keyword. There are thousands of these.
What's the best way to proceed at this point? Should I try to streamline the keywords? I haven't worked with keywords before, if I'm patient and break up the long text strings into individual keywords, will those long keywords automatically disappear if no photos are using them? If so, eventually the database will shrink to where it should be more sprightly.
The other alternative I can think of is to start over again. Rather than re-import from CDs and DVDs, I was thinking about clearing out the current stock library but keep the photos in the folders as they are. I could then import the images from the iPhoto directories by events, cleaning up the keywords as I go. I'm worried that doing it that way will lose the Event titles and I'd like to keep them rather than have the images randomly organized.
Power Mac G5 "Leviathan": 2.7 GHz DP/4.5 GB RAM, Mac OS X (10.4.7), Four 1-TB HDs, 30 GB iPod touch "Slick"
