iPhoto Keywords Made Easy

Apple’s implementation of keywords feels somewhat kludgy at best, and it’s a bit confusing, especially at first.
You have to open a special keywords panel, and also show the keywords in the main library. From there, when you want to categorize an image, you select the image(s), then find the keyword to assign in the keyword panel. Once you’ve found the keyword, you have to then click the Assign button to add it to the selected photo(s). This works fine, if not somewhat clumsily, if you have two or three keywords. But if you have a reasonable number of images, then you’re probably going to have 20 or 30 keywords, which greatly complicates the task of finding the one you’re after. And it doesn’t help that the keyword panel isn’t even sorted!

This is where Keyword Assistant (KA from here on) comes into the picture (so to speak). KA installs an additional menu in iPhoto, as seen at left. In addition to some handy utilities, such as Alphabetize Keywords Panel Now, the real power is the Show Assistant Panel, which opens a new one-line input window. With this window open, assigning keywords becomes significantly easier: Select the images you wish to modify, and then type the keyword into the Assistant box. When you hit Enter, the keyword is assigned. Want to assign multiple keywords at once? Just separate them with a comma before you hit Enter. What makes this really powerful, though, is that KA knows all your keywords, and
auto-completes your entries as soon as you’ve typed enough letters to uniquely identify them. In my case, I have only one “K” keyword (Kylie, of course), so I can categorize her images with one keystroke.

If you type a new keyword, you’ll be asked if you really want to create a new keyword (you can disable this warning in the KA menu), and then presto, you not only have a new keyword, but it’s been assigned to the images you selected.

The only missing from KA is that there’s not an easy way to remove just one keyword from an image — if you have
a picture with three keywords, and one is incorrect, you’ll either need to use Apple’s keyword panel to remove the incorrect keyword, or use KA and remove all three then start over. It’d be nice if something like an
Option-Click on the Assign button turned it into Remove instead. But this is a minor nitpick; KA is such a perfect addition to iPhoto, you’ll wonder why Apple didn’t build it in in the first place.

A Script To Automate iPhoto Image Imports

When I got a digital camera, I found that the integration between the camera and iPhoto wasn’t quite as tight as it was between my iPod and iTunes. iTunes automatically syncs and unmounts my iPod, whereas I have to click the “Import” button in iPhoto, and confirm that I want to delete the original images on the camera. Additionally, the camera isn’t automatically ejected, so when it powers off after a couple minutes of inactivity, the Finder gives the standard error about a disk being impropertly ejected. Here’s a script that imports, deletes, and ejects without any user intervention required.

To work, this script requires Panther with Folder Actions and GUI Scripting enabled. To turn on, click “Enable access for assistive devices” in the Universal Access preference pane. Place the script in Library > Scripts > Folder Action Scripts and enable it as a Folder action for /Volumes (you can get to /Volumes by using “Go to Folder” from the Finder’s Go menu). This script takes some hints from Apple’s GUI Scripting example page, and Apple’s Folder Action Scripting example page.

One caution: if you automatically delete images from your camera before verifying they imported correctly, you’re taking a bit of a risk. If there was an import problem, then your images are gone forever. For that reason, I use a manual import, and never tell iPhoto to delete the images when done.