iPhoto Keyword Assignment
Note: I have only tried this on iPhoto 5, but I suspect it will work on iPhoto 6.
I have been using Ken Ferry’s iPhoto Keyword Assistant, which is great and I highly recommend it. However, I have a mish-mosh of photos that are untagged, mixed in with those that are tagged, so it was always a pain to navigate to get to the untagged photos. The process usually involved switching from keyboard to mouse to highlight the next untagged photo. Not a big deal if you only have a few untagged, but I have over 1500 that I want tagged and I needed a faster way of doing it. My first attempt involved sorting by keyword, which almost worked, since it would put all untagged photos together. The problem is, that is soon as you assign the keywords, the highlighted photo then gets sorted into its new place and the cursor goes with it. Using the Apple-Left Arrow key to select the next photo for assignment would select the next photo to the one that was highlighted, resulting in an already assigned photo being selected. I would then have to scroll back down to the untagged selection and highlight the next photo to tag.
I have finally, however found a solution that does not require me to use the mouse, greatly speeding up the whole process.
1. Create a New Smart Album with “Keywords is None” as the only condition. This will create an album of all your untagged photos.
2. Right click the first picture and choose Edit. This will put you in Edit mode (not using edit mode results in your cursor going w/ your newly tagged photo, just as before).
3. Open the Keyword Assistant: apple-alt K
4. Assign keywords till you can’t anymore. Make sure you assign all the keywords you want to each photo, since as soon as you hit the “assign” key or enter, that picture is no longer going to belong in your “No Keywords” album. iPhoto should automatically keep you at the front of the list of pictures to edit.
Using this method has greatly increased my efficiency in assigning keywords, since I no longer need to use the mouse.
