Some Adventures With Keywords

I like many features of the Keyword system supplied with Aperture very much. But there are a few things which have been a little frustrating.

* The way the autocompletion feature works in the "Add Keyword" field in the Control Bar makes it too easy to misenter a keyword. You type your keyword, hit "Enter", and--oops--you've entered something you didn't mean to enter.

* Keywords entered in the HUD sometimes capitalize themselves when you don't want this. I haven't been able to determine why this happens, but I can't really understand why I would ever want the program to capitalize a word I didn't capitalize myself. Sometimes this is really frustrating--if I already have a keyword in the HUD, like "lake", and try to enter a phrase like "Kabetogama Lake" in the Control Bar field, Aperture simply won't let me make the "l" in lake uppercase no matter what I try.

* When you apply a keyword via the Control Bar field, if it doesn't exist in the Keyword HUD Aperture automatically it. Many times I do not want this, and there ought to be a preference to allow turning this off.

* The "keyword checkbox" interface of the Search HUD does not scale very well. As long as the pictures selected only contain a dozen or two unique keywords, this is fine, but when there are many all of the checkboxes and keywords overwhelm the HUD. Also, the HUD for some reason cannot be made wide enough to show long keywords after each checkbox, no matter how wide the screen on which it is displayed is.

* In my library, the search HUD shows multiple checkbox items with the identical keyword. Interestingly, selecting one or the other provides different results from the search. However, entering the phrase in the "Quick Search" field does return the correct picture subset. Perhaps rebuilding the library would help with this problem.

* I thought that the point of the hierarchical structure of the Keywords HUD would make it automatic to enter mutiple keywords which were related. For example, if I have a keyword of "tree" with a subcategory of "oak" I thought you would automatically get "tree" when you applied "oak" to a picture or pictures. Unless I'm missing something there is no way to do this. May a modifier key held down while dragging a keyword to a picture could add the parent keyword(s) as well.

Has anyone else had similar experiences?

Powerbook 15", Power Mac G5, Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Posted on Feb 3, 2006 1:02 AM

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19 replies

Feb 3, 2006 5:00 AM in response to patH72

Your last comment has me confused too. I thought the hierarchical keywords were just that: 'Nature/Tree/Oak' would add all three, but when you export a file only 'Oak' would show up in the IPTC keywords.

I sent Apple some feedback reporting this as a bug on the very first day I got Aperture. Perhaps you could do the same. The more users who complain about it the more chance it has of being fixed (or improved if it's not a 'bug').

Feb 3, 2006 10:42 AM in response to David Rawcliffe1

The keywords are truly hierarchical in the database; it's just that Aperture doesn't write each one of the parent words into the visible keyword list for each image.

To use the example you provided, if the hierarchy you've created is "Nature/Tree/Oak" and you apply the word "Oak" as a keyword, you can find that image later by just typing in the word Tree or Nature. Let's say that under Tree you've also got keywords such as Elm and Birch. If you've also applied "Elm" and "Birch" as keywords to other images, doing a Quick Search on just the word Tree would automatically find images that are tagged with Oak, Elm, Birch, etc.



Feb 3, 2006 1:57 PM in response to patH72

<...>
* The "keyword checkbox" interface of the Search HUD
does not scale very well. As long as the pictures
selected only contain a dozen or two unique keywords,
this is fine, but when there are many all of the
checkboxes and keywords overwhelm the HUD. Also, the
HUD for some reason cannot be made wide enough to
show long keywords after each checkbox, no matter how
wide the screen on which it is displayed is.

<...>

I don't really have much to add on the other items as I've not made extensive use of keywording as yet.

However as far as searching goes, there is an alternative other than the checkboxes - direct IPTC searching. You can use the "+" dropdown from the query window to add a new "IPTC" search type, then select "Keywords" and enter in keywords you want to search for manually.

Feb 8, 2006 12:38 PM in response to patH72

Keywording is something i have never had the discipline to do, but now that libraries are getting unmanageable i can see their benefits in Aperture. Does anyone know of good methods/techniques/structures for applying keywords ?

I ask because it looks like an attribute that you want to spend great care setting-up correctly at the start, but is also flexible. I appreciate there will be different structure that suits everybody, but can others share or give pointers ?

Thanks
J

Feb 8, 2006 9:32 PM in response to patH72

* In my library, the search HUD shows multiple
checkbox items with the identical keyword.
Interestingly, selecting one or the other provides
different results from the search. However, entering
the phrase in the "Quick Search" field does return
the correct picture subset. Perhaps rebuilding the
library would help with this problem.


Keywording is an area where it either hasn't been thought through or is the victim of the rush to market. Keywords appear twice if you create identical ones under two different folders. For example, Vacation/Pool and Home/Pool. Pool shows up twice. Even if you remove one of the keywords from all images and delete the keywords from the HUD Aperture doesn't clean up the listing. I tried messing with the database and just mucked it up. Maybe someone will come up with a 3rd party utility to manage the database. Lord knows it's needed.

I cleaned up my database by creating a new Aperture library and re-importing everything. I had no choice as I had mucked it up, but it did solve the problem. Now I am careful to never duplicate a keyword in the HUD.

Feb 9, 2006 12:51 AM in response to critical focus

You are right. There are "invisible" keywords entered, which appear to be "parents" of the given keyword, at the time of entry (reorganizing the keywords after entry apparently has no effect).

But this is really strange. I would assume that when I type in a keyword search, the only items that would be found would be those which contain that keyword, as displayed in that keyword list. But now I find a bunch of other items as well, and I may not know why. If a keyword is moved from one category to another, or a category name is changed or deleted, I'm going to get results which I won't be able to figure out the reason for.

There are a bunch of othere unpredictable behaviors one can imagine. For example, there seems to be no way to get rid of the invisible "parent" keyword once it has been associated with the picture unless you remove all keywords from that item.

There is a lot of potential here for screwing up your keyword data, I think. BTW, as far as I can tell this "feature" is not documented in the manual or anywhere else I have been able to find.

Feb 14, 2006 12:05 AM in response to patH72

Here is another issue with keywords.

Why is a search using a single keyword so slow? On my PowerBook, a search of a relatively small library--1500 images--takes in the neighborhood of 17-20 seconds. How can it take this long? A similar search of my full library (about 7000 images) using Portfolio 7 is virtually instantaneous. The graphics card surely can't be blamed for this one. This is, after all, the company which highlights their Spotlight technology...

Two other nits. First, it's not clear when the search is complete. There's no progress bar or other indication of completion, so sometimes when you do a search, a group of pictures appear and you think it's done, but suddenly more images appear. Then you wait a while until you feel certain it must be done.

Secondly, when a search is finished and the subset of images which were found is displayed, there's no indication that it's not the entire project or libarary, particularly when the Search HUD is dismissed. For example, it just says "104 images displayed", rather than "104 of 1500 images displayed" or something like that. It ought to be very obvious that you are not viewing the entire container of images.

Feb 14, 2006 6:23 AM in response to patH72

It sounds like there are rough edges still with this feature. I did try a few simple structures to test it out and i too found the searching by keywords very slow. It is a bit of a surprise given how clever Tiger is, but i fully expect Apple to iron out these wrinkles. I have great faith in what smart folders extensive keywording will do.

Feb 14, 2006 7:32 AM in response to Jeyell

When? When are we going to see an update? Are they going to announce 2.0 and expect us to pay them more money?

There have been what, two updates to Aperture? There should be a steady stream of updates. Instead of leaving your customers to flounder in the wind, release a steady stream of updates to address issues. This process would build support and let everyone know you're serious about the product.

Feb 15, 2006 12:16 AM in response to patH72

I have another issue with keywords.

With the Search HUD interface there seems to be no way to do a search as simple as "find all the lighthouse pictures in Oregon or Washington", assuming the keywords "lighthouse", "Oregon", and "Washington" have been applied to various images. This is very easy to express in natural language, as I have just done, or easy to code in a database or programming language, but not possible in Aperture.

Other programs which use the "any/all popup" interface generally allow the above search to be accomplished in stages. That is, you search for all pictures containing the word lighthouse, and then run a second search--items containing Oregon or Washington--on the subset which resulted from the first search. Unless I am missing something, this isn't possible in Aperture. Others--Google, Spotlight being examples--allow special terms in the search text field, such as in the present example "lighthouse AND (Oregon OR Washington)". This doesn't appear to be possible either.

I think this feature is pretty essential in a keyword access system.

Feb 15, 2006 5:20 AM in response to Piggy

Piggy,

I think the recent requests by Apple to receive real file comparisons of Aperture and PS interpretations is very good news. All the vibes point to this package being important to them. So far the evidence is not strong though, one .01 release within 3 months of shipping is a small step forward, but it is forward. Time will tell exactly how serious the Aperture team is to build-on (and debug) this unique approach to digital photography.

You are right, things should work 'as advertised' on day one, but sadly in Tech, especially software, what seperates the best companies from others is how good their products are 6-12 months after their release. By which time they have not only debuged and optimised but added new features. Only then will Customers consider paying for the subsequent release ie. Aperture 2.0.

To get back on-topic, is there anyone happily using keywording/smart folders ?

J

Feb 16, 2006 12:01 AM in response to L M

Sure, but then every time I did one of these searches I'd end up with another album cluttering the interface (although I could delete it). Since most if not all cataloging programs provide a straightforward capability for this kind of search Aperture probably should have done so from the beginning as well.

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Some Adventures With Keywords

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