Personally, I recommend paying full price for the Keyword Manager. It is completely worth it, and the support is top notch. There are ways to save money (via MacZot today only, and using Coupon Codes that you can find just about everywhere), but I suggest strongly that you purchase a copy at full price.

John Gruber said it best “Aim for high quality and set your price accordingly.”. The developers of Keyword Manager have done just that, and while they are trying to get their name out there with these promotions – I still believe that this is one plugin that is worth more than it’s price tag.

[tags]iphoto, apple, macintosh, keywords, tagging, bullstorm, keyword manager, john gruber, daringfireball, maczot[/tags]
[slug]keyword-mananger[/slug]

Fixes

As I said, my list of fixes will be pretty short.

An unlimited number of labels would be where I’d start. If you open your preferences in Finder you have a Labels area that gives you a selection of 7 colors that you can change the names of, to fit the label. I use this feature rather sparingly so I can actually get what I need labeled within the 7-label-limit – however why is this a limitation at all? Why not have a quick + button that lets you select a color, name the label, and you are off to the races. Perhaps it has to do with people deleting labels that scares Apple from including such a feature.

Saved searches are currently the only folders that allow you to view things “like Spolight” windows show files. By kind, date, etc. If you create a smart folder you can see a new view button at the top – but yet you can not view those on other folders. I think it’d be neat to have that view across the system, not just within saved searches.

Keyword autocomplete when doing a keyword search is really annoying. If you do a search within Finder, then click + and add a Keyword filter – Finder will load your list of keywords from your entire system (including those in iPhoto). On my Macbook it took about 20 seconds to do this (good ole’ beachball meantime), and then it autocompleted anything I typed. Instead of being able to type in partial names (i.e. Paul), it forced me to search for a specific Paul. Here’s the annoying part, I have 7 people that I know with the first name of Paul, and 8 that I know with the last name of Paul. Turn the autocomplete off.

DMG mounts should not automatically be opened with the finder in “collapsed mode”. I am not sure where to throw the blame here – if it is Apple, the developer who packaged the DMG, or something that I’ve set on my system. But I have never once wanted to keep Finder in collapsed view since I will eventually have to drag the application into my applications folder to install it.

Feature requests

There is a lot of hoopla about having tabs and other various things, but I’m not sure I’m on board with that yet.

Better media browsing when you are viewing a folder filled with images, movies, or audio. Right now if I’m viewing a directory full of JPGs I can view it in thumbnail (or tile) view, and then open my preferences and bump up the size of the thumbnails. But why not an iPhoto like slider for this type of thing? Why not have a quick way to sort by date, kind, or keyword?

Apple should start taking some of the functionality back out of the applications that it creates and start putting those features into the operating system. Make it just as easy to find a photo in Finder as it is to do in iPhoto.

Final thoughts

See, that wasn’t so bad. I’m sure the improvements to Finder in Leopard will be pretty broad. Not only because of the amount of criticism that has flew – but also because there will be new features that it needs to support (such as Time Machine).

I’m not sure I want to see it change too much though – and if it becomes anything as bloated as Path Finder I may just have to revolt!

Note: Be sure to check out other parts of my Leopard wish list listed below:

1. Part one: Safari
2. Part two: Mail
3. Part three: iChat
4. Part three: Finder

[tags]finder, macintosh, apple, mac os x, osx, leopard, wish list, iphoto, keywords, searching[/tags]
[slug]leopard-wishes-pt4-finder[/slug]

Pickles inspecting the floor

After the cats approved of our floors, we put them away. Now I’m just waiting to do one final sweep and mop before we start putting on the coats of wax.

9:48 AM – What do you do when you’re waiting to wax the floor? Tag photos in iPhoto of course. I’m still playing catch-up on this front and I have a little over 8,500 photos that still need tagging. At least 15,000 that still need to be cataloged by event. And over 20,000 that need to be rated. Have you caught up?

9:52 AM – A quick question for all of you. I just came across roughly 1,000 photos that have the wrong date/time from the camera. This may have happened because the camera was set to 1/1/1999 for some reason after changing the batteries once. I am not sure exactly what date they were taken, but I’d really like to have them appear correctly chronologically.

What I’ve done, for now, is tag them with the keyword “wrongdate” so that I can get back to them later. Any ideas as to how best to figure out what date they were taken?

10:27 AM – My new way of getting caught up on assigning keywords to my photos has been tag layering. What I do is a first pass of tagging only people that appear in the photos. Then, I go back through and create albums for each “event”. Once that is done, I assign the appropriate geo tags, location tags, and even event tags.

I’ve found it is much more rewarding to do this in layers to help to keep moving forward, rather than only getting a few hundred photos done a day.

12:03 PM – Just finished mopping the entire floor. I did the best job I could, using Joy dish detergent (which is highly recommended to remove any oils from tile flooring), to make sure that the wax can make a good bond with the tile.

Now I’m just waiting for Mark (our friend who knows how to do this stuff) to get here so we can go pick up the materials needed to pull this off. What to do in the meantime?! *opens iPhoto again*

Rebuilding cache

12:16 PM – iPhoto has been asking me to rebuild my thumbnail cache for quite sometime, so I finally gave in and selected to allow it to go ahead and do just that. Maybe this will give me a little better performance. My main question I guess is why iPhoto doesn’t build thumbnails on import, and if it does, why does it need to rebuild the cache? Oh, and why can’t it be more like the way iMovie or iDVD handles video compression and rendering and build the thumbnail caches in the background while still allowing me to do other things within iPhoto? I mean, I have “two processors” do I not?

7:37 PM – Three coats, and one chinese buffet later, we’re done. Now we just have to let the last coat cure before we start putting everything back onto the tile. It looks good, and should do well to protect the floor for years to come.

[tags]photos, pickles, animals, cat, floor, wax, keywords, tagging, iphoto, apple, macintosh, applications, software[/tags]

But then it dawned on me the task that was ahead of me. I had been without the Keyword Assistant for months, and I refuse to use iPhoto’s built in tagging features, so I was months behind on the categorization of my photo library. Not to mention that I had never caught up in the first place.

Since the update was released I have been feverishly tagging my photos with their appropriate keywords. Even though it is an incredibly mundane process, it can get addictive. I try to fit the tagging of my photos into my everyday activities, so I do a few hundred at a time. I’m still behind by a little over 11,000 photos, which says a lot being that I’ve managed to get about 7,700+ done so far.

While I was going through this process, I’d been also rotating the photos, adding them to appropriate albums, and adjusting the date-taken on some. This process has led to the following few observations that I recommend all keep in mind.

Set the date on your camera

Your digital camera has a date setting that will be automatically added to each photos information when you take the photo. This helps with the sorting of your photos in chronological order. It may seem like a no-brainer, but when you get a new camera be sure to set the date and time before you start snapping photos. This will save you a lot of time in the long run.

Tag photos on import

If you are doing any type of keyword tagging, do it when you import your photos, rather than waiting until later. This will ensure that you don’t get behind on the process, and make your searching life much easier.

Learn from Flickr: Create albums

Flickr allows you to create photo sets (or albums). These can be used for absolutely anything, grouping photos together at your will rather than by meta-data. For example, you can have an album full of photos of yourself, your friends, and lightning – and it wouldn’t matter. Albums are less for classification and more for getting to a group of photos easily.

My suggestion is to create albums based on events to find photos quickly and easily.

Back up your photo library

Again, this might seem like a “duh” – but you’d be doing yourself a huge favor if you backed up your entire photo library. I have my entire photo library on a separate firewire drive, as well as on DVD. If I was really smart I’d take those DVDs and put them in someone else’s home, this way if my home burnt down and I lost all my computer equipment, I’d still have our photos. The same could be said for music, documents, work files, etc. Burn a few DVDs worth of information and toss them to your closest friend to put in their closet. It may just make the difference someday.

So, after I follow the tips above I have three main ways that I categorize my photos. The first would be date. By having accurate dates and times on my photos I can quickly use the calendar feature and find photos from any date in my digital photo taking history. The second would be by keyword. Each photo is tagged with keywords relating to what is in the photo. People, places, and things is what I usually follow – though sometimes I also add the event into the mix. The third way, is by photo albums. I have photo albums for every vacation, as an example. This allows me to quickly rifle through every single photo I’ve taken on all my vacations, or I can limit it by a specific date range (i.e. all photos I’ve taken on vacation in 2004) or by specific vacation like all the vacation photos I’ve taken in 2004 in Myrtle Beach.

I still have a very long way to go, and hopefully I’ll find even better ways to categorize my photos that makes it fun to go back and find stuff accurately and quickly. But now, I’ve got 11,000 photos to tag.

[tags]iphoto, photo library, keyword assistant, photos, tagging, keywords[/tags]

For quite awhile now (actually, probably since I moved everything to this domain), I’ve been tagging my posts with keywords that in some way describe the content of the post I had just written. This serves many purposes – the first and most important of which is that each post becomes inherently more searchable. The second is that content indexing services like Google and Technorati will index your content much more efficiently, making it much easier for those looking for it to find it. The benefits are obvious then right? Accessible content and increased exposure. A win-win.

When I first set out to add the ability to tag posts on this site, I had a few specific requirements. The most notable requirement was that I needed to be able to tag my posts quickly and from an external application. The first challenge to do that would be to find an application that works seamlessly with WordPress in this regard. Fat chance. Most weblog posting applications that do “play nice” with WordPress do a fairly poor job of interacting with WordPress above the normal post/edit activities. I think I’ll write more on this subject in the future.

What I ended up using was Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW), a WordPress plugin, that adds the ability to tag your posts in WordPress. It also fit my main requirement of being able to add tags to posts quickly and via an external application. The way UTW handles this by allowing me to add a simple text string to the end of my posts (and it can even extrapolate tags from within the post content itself) when I write them in MarsEdit. Beautiful.

Snag! The snag I’m referring to came when I tried to have UTW use a specific permalink structure. I desired to have /keyword/TAGHERE/ as my permalinks for tag-specific searches. But since my post permalinks are already /category/post-name/ there was an immediate conflict. WordPress would determine /keyword/ as the category and /TAGHERE/ as the post name, which would throw a 404 error every time. There have been attempts to fix this, but to no avail yet. I might add that this is not a bug in UTW nor in WordPress, just a URL compatibility issue – and is only present in the latest versions of WordPress.

Since I was unable to resolve this issue, and I really desired to have nice looking URLs for my keywords, I hid the fact that I was tagging posts for far too long. How did I do this? Well, quite simply really. I still wanted the benefits of having the keywords, but I just didn’t want to show them so I had a DIV and it’s style was simply display: none;. Well, I’ve finally given into the ugly URLs (index.php?tag=TAGHERE), and have made the keywords visible on each post of this site. Most posts are tagged, but not all, so someday I’ll take the time to rip through my archives and update each post.

Also of note is a slightly refreshed home page. So, enjoy the keyword verticals, and have a great Friday.

[tags]cdevroe.com, refresh, tags, keywords, ultimate tag warrior, utw, wordpress, marsedit, taxonomy[/tags]