Does Aperture have hierarchical tags like Lightroom does?

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Level 1

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Does Aperture have hierarchical tags like Lightroom does?

I've been addicted to hierarchical keywords/tags for some years now. First in Digikam and then in Adobe Lightroom. Since the price on Aperture is nice after the Mac Store came, I'm tempted to switch away from Lightroom. But I'm having difficulties finding out if Aperture supports hierarchical keywords. Does anybody know more about this?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.6)

Posted on Jan 22, 2011 2:40 PM

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Answer 1

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rwboyer

Level 4

3,170 points

Jan 22, 2011 5:35 PM in response to Ayabara

The answer is "sort of",

It supports keywords "I assume that is what you mean" that are hierarchical in so much that if you assign the leaf level (bottom level) keyword to a photo searches for any keyword above it in the hierarchy will cause that image to "show" up. So yes - Aperture supports them internally.

When it comes to import and export of those hierarchical keywords that is where Aperture's support falls down next to what you may be used to in LR. In fact exporting from Aperture will only net you that leaf level keyword in the export that was originally assigned. It has been like this forever and unless they changed something in like the last week that is the way it still is.

I for one would like import/export support EXACTLY like LR works.

RB

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Answer 2

Ayabara Author

Level 1

0 points

Jan 23, 2011 1:15 AM in response to rwboyer

So it's better than I feared, but still probably a showstopper for me. Portability of hierarchical keywords is a must, since I've spent quite some time adding them to my pictures, and can't guarantee that I will stay in the same photo-application forever and ever.

(What I would also really like is to be able to embed the faces-information I have stored in the metadata of the pictures. Sounds like a script I will have to write myself)

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Answer 3

Acetone.

Level 1

81 points

Feb 10, 2011 5:37 PM in response to Ayabara

There is an AppleScript freely available at http://brettgrossphotography.com/2009/01/12/aperture-applescript-make-hierarchal -keywords-real-v4 that will make Aperture keywords behave hierarchically on export.

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