Keyword vs tag

Well, I actually did read that (its the first place I looked) and referenced it above. It only gives you 9 keyboard shortcuts at one time, which is kind of a drag. You have to switch (using the mouse) through multiple sets if you want to be able to tag more than 9 at a time using shortcuts (which sort of defeats the purpose). With iPhoto I could hammer through hundreds of pictures and tag them without touching my mouse at all. I had keys assigned to my 30-40 or so of my most commonly used tags so that when going through each photo all I had to do was press 'd' for daughter or 'w' for wife or 'c' for california etc. then the right arrow to go the next one. Aperture is much more unwieldy. There is absolutely no way to do this without multiple mouse clicks, drags or even typing into the search box in the control panel or HUD. Sure maybe your top 9 keywords have shortcuts, but that is just not enough.

While we're at it, A3 doesn't seem to have a very intuitive way to navigate through events / folders without having to resort to using the mouse. You HAVE to double click on an image to maximize it, there's no space bar, RETURN or ENTER key that will do that. It's ludicrous really.

Lastly the program crashes at least a once every time I use it. I really want to like the program but find it hard to use, unintuitive and buggy. I have 2 more days left on the trial... it has so much to offer but it is leaving me very frustrated. I have a personal library of 30K images and a business-related library of 10K. I need to be able to process large amounts of images quickly without tons of mousing around. Aperture doesn't seem to offer that functionality quite yet.

-macguyincali

I'll experiment some more with it, although I haven't quite gotten it to work as smoothly as in iPhoto (weird, for a pro-level app that costs $200). One thing I notice in the New Keyword Entry field is that once you're in the text field entering stuff, you have to get out of the field in order to do anything. This requires clicking with the mouse outside the box. It was alot easier in iPhoto, one hand on the arrow key and the other hand simply clicking one of the many tag shortcuts I use. Now, my hand has to leave the keyboard pretty often.

Also, it occasionally gives me the spinning rainbow ball of death when I perform Keyword changes on large numbers of images using the New Keyword Entry Field (I'm actually posting this while I wait for spinning ball to go away). And lastly, AP3 crashes completely (app closes abruptly) when I'm Editing the Keyword Buttons. It happens pretty often.

In a word, it is not Apple-like simplicity.

Well, I seem to have pinpointed the situations that make AP3 crash for me:

1) when I'm editing keyword button sets. If I reorder more than 2 or 3 buttons in one session that are already in a group, when I press 'done,' AP3 crashes and closes immediately, losing any changes I've made to the button set. I've replicated this dozens of times.

2) when editing Manage my Places, on several occasions the whole program would freeze up for minutes at a time. At one point, Aperture would not open at all, increasingly eating up the memory (up to 14GB per Activity Monitor) until it would slow down the whole system. I'll post my solution in my other discussion.

Still not satisfied with the keyboard navigation in AP3, although the hints offered above have been helpful. Its silly, I've been using AP3 for a few weeks and I've had SO many problems. I think I'm starting to get a handle on the inexplicable crashes, though, which is good (I know what to avoid doing).

I do use the V, but under certain circumstances it doesn't accomplish the desired effect. Now that I'm using it every day, I'm getting use to the V method.

Is anyone getting the pulldown menu glitch in the Command Bar? Sometimes (pretty often actually) when I'm scrolling through keywords in the Add Keyword field, the scrolling popup window stays on screen permanently. No matter what view I'm in... browser, split, etc. Even in Full Screen. Which is weird. I've submitted a bug report, but I wonder if I'm not missing something.

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re: the keyword implementation, I think they could have made it much smoother to apply multiple keyword shortcuts ala iPhoto... using the Keyword HUD. When the HUD is activated, the keyword keyboard shortcuts would be activated as well and you could apply as many as you wanted. By tying them to the HUD, you wouldn't interfere with the many other system shortcuts that Ap3 uses. That way, when you're in keyword mode (tagging mode) you have anywhere from 26 to 52 shortcuts available (alphabet lower and upper case). You simply deactivate the HUD if you want to make other adjustments. Also, keywords should be toggled so you type a keyword and it appears (or disappears if already applied). Having to rapidly type Command-Shift-8 to untag something is kind of annoying.

Enough of my whining. I've already sent requests to apple about these things, but maybe I'm the lone idiot who cares about this. I still feel it was worth the money, though and I am truly enjoying Ap3's functionality otherwise.