Faces vs. Keywords

Evening all,
Just wanted to get a consensus...I think the Faces feature in iPhoto '09 is...promising, but doesn't do that good of a job unless the face is head-on.
Now that I've been playing with it, I find it much easier (and faster as I have a lot of photos left to import) to use keywords for people in the photo vs. clicking each one for missing faces.
What works for everyone else? Would appreciate your opinions/insight...
Also, is there a limit to the amount of keywords you can add?
Thanks,
Marc
Message was edited by: LightstormAnimationStudios

I prefer faces
TD (who is on Holiday in Italy celebrating San Patrick's day) prefers keywords
It really is up to you - to me Faces is faster and easier - others disagree
I use the camera time for when, faces for who, places for where and keywords for what and why giving me Who, What, When, Where and Why for each photo
There is not limit but practically there is - if you have a bunch you probably want Key Word manager - http://www.bullstorm.se/KeywordManager.php
LN

Similar Messages

Faces and Keywords

I woild like to update my keywords with names in faces without exporting photos.
Exists another way?

Until someone comes up with a better suggestion, I would do this:
. Add the Names you would like to use as Keywords to your Keyword list. (The best way to do this, imho, is to create a tabbed text file and import it. I prefix all Keywords I use to create a Keyword hierarchy with "aa." -- this forces them to the top of my Keyword list, and helps me to not use my Keyword containers as Keywords (which has significant advantages). One can simply add the new Keywords using the Keyword HUD, however.)
. Create a new Smart Album. Call it "Use to add name Keyword to named Faces". Assign the Filter Rules "Face" "is" "InsertFacesNameHere" and "Rating" "is greater than or equal to" "unrated" to the Smart Folder.
Periodically select this Smart Album, change "InsertFacesNameHere" to one of your Faces names, select all in the Browser, and drag the name you want from the Keywords HUD and drop it on your selected images. Repeat for each named Face, as desired.
Why are you doing this? As the above shows, the Faces names are usable in the same way within Aperture as Keywords are.
Message was edited by: Kirby Krieger (cleaned up and added final question).

Faces vs Keywords : A suggestion

Reading through some of the posts here I can sympathise with many of the frustrations. I've just converted some iPhoto libs and added in the Faces feature to most of them. It's hard work, a lot of typing. The facial recognition feature is still in the early stages. It's clearly challenged by angles, shade, glasses, beards, ageing, etc..
The Keyword feature is much more robust. You can create a selection or an album of photos and apply a Keyword to all of them at the same time, with few clicks. This saves time. If you set up your Keywords primarily as peoples names, the only real time investment is collating the relevant photos together.
The integration with Address Book is excellent. Apple could really build on this.
Conclusion: Faces is a nice idea for personalising photos, but it's not helpful to create unnecessary work for the user. People's names do not change often over time so Keywords become "permanent". Faces change.
Suggestion:
a neat feature would be to allow the user to select a group of photos (or a smart album based on a Keyword) and apply the name to all the faces in those photos, using the best matches. Then the user could confirm the matches and modify (or ignore) the mismatches. At least this would save time. If the use of Keywords for people's names is too specific or limiting, why not just create a new tag called "Name". You can imagine a palette with names, like the list of keywords, which could be applied to all the faces in a group of photos. Or open Address Book and make it more integrated in the process. Clearly the same names will occur frequently in a library. Checking on family names (surnames) within a group of photos for example would limit the number of matches and speed up the process.
Just some ideas...

Iain
iPhoto menu -> Provide iPhoto Feedback is the route to the developers with Suggestions. This forum is for Users talking to other Users...
Regards
TD

Thousand of person face recognition keywords disappeared - how do I reindex?

Hi,
While using the new face recognition feature halfway through 60 000 photo the keyword link disappeared for a number of the persons I had indexed. I assume they are all gone, but how do I restart a new indexing. There does not seem to be an option for this.
rgds

Hello Geoff,
Smart albums might be helpful for you:
Create a smart album with the single rule: "Face is not unnamed".
This will contail all images with faces assigned. To find all images without faces, use the rule: Face is unnamed.
You can also search for "Face is not John".
Regards
Léonie

Burning photos DVD and keeping faces/keywords

I'm new to this forum.
I have iPhoto '11 and recently tried burning several events to DVD to free up some memory.
I burned a DVD using iPhoto and temporarily put events into trash.
Re-inserted the DVD. iPhoto opened and I could see all the photos in each event ... but no faces or keywords.
Is there any way to burn a DVD w/ events and keep faces/keywords? (I spent > 10 hours assigning faces and keywords and assumed burned DVD would keep all this information when I pulled up photos).
Thanks in advance for reply.
Keith

hello, lupita
Welcome to the Aperture forum!
I am new to aperture and in trying to burn my photos
to dvd (with toast 6 or idvd), I have a couple of
questions. First, can I just drag and drop the
images or do I need to export them?
if you have made Aperture Previews (if not Update the Version Previews first that you want to drag & drop) you can drag & drop them into the drop zone of iDVD from the Browser (it takes a while for iDVD Media option to see the Previews while they Update)
or you can access your photos through the Media/Photos/Aperture Library option in iDVD
or you can export Versions to a folder on a hard drive and iDVD/File/Import/Image
Secondly, when I
have dragged and dropped photos into the Toast screen
the file size is considerably smaller (about one
fifth the size). Am I just dragging the preview?
yes.
It
seems when I export a photo to my desktop it is also
then a smaller file size.
Exporting a photograph (Version) from Aperture can have several size and quality options, since you want your photos to be the same size then make sure the Versions are not being resized which it sounds like they have been. Select & edit the Presets/Image Presets... for Export
or, Export the Version and at the window prompt select the Export Preset: Edit to modify the presets to your liking.
How to
I burn to dvd select full size versions of my
photos?
Export Version/Edit/Export Preset/ now select file type TIFF or JPEG or PSD you want "Original Size" etc.
At the Export window select the DVD/CD so the files go into it
REF:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304499
victor

Should I keep using keywords in addition to faces?

Normally I would use keywords to identify each person in my photos. Now that I have faces, should I stop using keywords to identify people? What do you guys think?
Thanks!

I agree with Larry. If you want to share your photos with others with PC their applications will only read the keywords, titles and description metadata and not the faces. Keywords are, IMO, very important.

Is it me, or is faces at best a beta / research quality feature?

Here are the problems I have encountered so far:
I'm in the same boat - never really used faces in iPhoto, just trying it out in Aperture. From what I can see, it's pretty weak in its implementation. A few of the things I have found:
The face detection itself is rather hit and miss. I've got photos that have a plain face that are not detected, and have had the moon, wheels, blankets, a horses butt and other odd things detected as faces.
I've tried to add a missing face, and it will sometimes save it, but I've got some photos that I have added the same face region 5 times and it won't save.
When I've tried to assign names to faces in bulk, I'll get no more suggestions, but when I go photo by photo, it will ask if it is the person I was trying to bulk update.
When you are assigning names photo by photo, it will occasionally decide it knows who it is, but there doesn't seem to be any shortcut key, so you need to stop using the keyboard, grab the mouse, select yes/no, then go back to typing - it's a bit of a pain.
The recognition is ... spotty. For some reason it decided that the Time cover of Barac Obama was my 2 year old daughter. It also thought she was the moon. And the blanket. And the horses butt.
When you are in the faces section of the library and you double click on a face, you can't get back to where you were. You need to go and select a node in the Library pane (like faces), then go back to the person you were looking at.
Have I mentioned that it misses lots of faces. Lots and lots and lots of faces. I've got one specific project with ~2100 pictures, it missed faces in about half of them. There isn't much point in using the feature if it isn't going to work for half of the photos, and given the awkward interface to manually find faces (and spotty at best persistence of edits), it's really not something worth doing.
To me, it seems like an interesting idea poorly implemented. Is anyone having any better success with the feature? Any tips or tricks to get it to work better?

Let's all face it, Faces is a "gee whiz" technology feature that uses copious amounts of processing power to display a technology that not only does not work very well, but even if it did it is not required by any professional photographer.
It cannot, and probably never will, be able to find ALL instances of a person being in a photograph, they don't claim it can, only human eyes using keywords can.
Now as a professional, as an example of where I want to identify some faces, I keyword all images for which I have model releases for the subjects, so they can be easily found and referred to. If I relied on faces it would only be finding SOME of these images, AND STEALING CPU TIME TO DO IT...grrrrrr!!! This is utterly useless and counterproductive.
I would like to hear from any other working professional on here, someone who derives 100% of their income from photography, please tell me I am missing something here, and I will immediately question your sanity...ER..no, I mean listen carefully to your opinion.
While I am on the soapbox, Places is of no professional use to me nor is geotagging...never had a client ask me or care about this ever...maybe in the future, who knows...
and Flickr and Facebook, jeez...ain't making me a dime...and why would I want to use these things professionally. How about a button for PROFESSIONAL SERVICES, like Pictage export manager in 64-bit at the A3 release, or Photo Shelter???
NO, THEY were relegated to PLUG-INS...according to you, Flickr and Facebook belong on the front page of a professional app...c'mon guys.
ALL THESE THINGS SHOULD BE OPTIONAL PLUG-INS!!! THEREFORE INCAPABLE OF CLUTTERING MY INTERFACE OR STEALING ONE SECOND OF MY TIME OR MACHINE PERFORMANCE....sorry, I will stop now, throat is getting sore from screaming...
THEY NEEDED TO STAY IN IPHOTO, where parents too lazy to keyword can get the computer to find their kids for them, a feature Apple even touted in its TV ads. "Stacks" from 2009 found here: http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/. Having geotagged pics of the car trip from my son's coolpix was fun, and he made a map in this slideshow...more fun. Show me the money, and I will allow it on my interface.
Brushes and curves and all the presets JUST ROCK!!! So does the new converter, my Leica D-LUX 4 works now YAAY!...and so much more great stuff...HUGE SMILE HERE...
To the core photographic image management members of the Aperture team, it frankly must be professionally insulting to have to deal with marketing and product management who insist on putting c.r.a.p. features, useless to a professional shooter, on a superb professional product simply to attract technology buffs.
Ask marketing to see that focus group study of working pros who demanded these things...oops, musta missed that meeting, lol.
On top of that these gadgets DON'T EVEN WORK WELL, and you guys as a team are actually facing heat from users for things that had no business being there in the first place.
Faces impacts LIBRARY CONVERSION if left on...PERFECT, just PERFECT, as if you don't have enough to do finding and squashing version x.0 bugs in the real features without having to field calls about things that should never have been in Aperture 3 in the first place...jeez!
To the core photographic image management members of the team, YOURS is the work I highly respect and applaud and it is THAT GREAT WORK that needed to be highlighted, center stage and alone in the ads and on the box, not some useless, goofy feature like Faces and Places. I am indignant at this being here...truth to tell, I bet you are simply FURIOUS.
Sincerely,
K.J. Doyle
gotta go get a throat lozenge here...or maybe a stiff drink...

Face recognition using elemets 8 to lightroom 3

Experiementing with face recognition using elemets 8 then trying to export the meta data to my lr catalog.. so far not working. any ideas?

In PSE 8, when you add a keyword to a recognized face, that keyword is added to the photo. If you then do File > Write Keyword Tag in PSE, the keyword tag coresponding to the face will be written to the photo. LR will then be able to import that keyword. But the information about the rectangular location of the face within the photo isn't available to LR.

Merged iPhoto and Aperture Libraries - Faces Didn't Transfer

I merged my iPhoto library into my Aperture library and non of the Faces or Keywords from my iPhoto library transfered.
Any suggestions?
(There was an error when I merged the two and it said it had to repair the database when Aperture reopened. Should I try to merge the two again?)
Thanks!

I have a similar problem with my Aperture library after the 3.3.2 update, see:
Re: Aperture 3.3.2 Update: All faces are gone from my main Aperture library
Repair Library did not help; What brought the faces back for me was to rebuild the Aperture library, not repair. But before you try a rebuild, back up the Aperture library and test, if the backup is in working condition.
After rebuilding, Aperture may hang, when rebuilding the faces.db. Give it plenty of time to finish, best over night. If you have to force quit, you will need to run a repair afterwards.
As to missing keywords - my keywords were still there, but the keywords HUD stopped working - the keywords were not found, when being entered into the search field. This was solved after rebuilding.
One big problem with keywords in the unified library format is, that iPhoto does not support nested, hierarchical keywords. If your Aperture library contains hierarchichal keywords, say "Animals > Birds > Sparrow" and your iPhoto library has keywords "Birds" and "Sparrow", you will end up with duplicate keywords for "Birds" and "Sparrow" at different levels of the hierarchie and any smart album and keyword control set using these keywords will no longer work. You will have to delete your keyword sets, and to merge the duplicate keywords again in the Keywords HUD. Then apply at least one keyword new, to force writing of the keywords to the library, quit Aperture, log off and on again, if you are using MacOS X Lion, relaunch Aperture. Then redefine your keyword control sets and smart albums that are using keywords.
Regards
Léonie

Finding all photos that include a particular person whether their face appears or not

Faces is a great way to locate all photos where someone's face appears. But what about photos that the person is in, but their face is not (e.g., the photo was taken from behind the person)? What's the best way to tag photos so that I'll be able to have all photos that contain Person X together, whether their face is in the photo or not? (Note: I know I could use Faces to add a face to the back of someone's head - that would get that picture to appear in Faces for that person, but would likely mess up the face recognition for that person).
My current thought is to use keywords to tag those photos with the names of people who appear in photos without their face showing. I could then create a Smart Album that includes all photos that contain a Face or Keyword for Person X. Is there a better way to accomplish this?

(Note: I know I could use Faces to add a face to the back of someone's head - that would get that picture to appear in Faces for that person, but would likely mess up the face recognition for that person).
That will not mess up the face recognition. iPhoto will only use the faces that have been automatically found by iPhoto to learn the parameters for the recognition of the person. So you can include any part of the person to get the photot in the Faces stack on the cork board.
My current thought is to use keywords to tag those photos with the names of people who appear in photos without their face showing. I could then create a Smart Album that includes all photos that contain a Face or Keyword for Person X. Is there a better way to accomplish this?
That is fine, but does not give you access by using the Faces view.

Faces identified but tags missing

I'm having a problem with the Faces feature. As an example, the image below shows 3 faces identified and labeled in the image, while only two "Faces" tags are listed on the right hand side. The last names have been erased for anonymity.
My library has ~ 4000 photos (~230 events) from various sources (e.g. iPhone, Canon Eos). I use Faces (~120), Keywords (~250), Locations (hundreds), folders, albums, smart albums. Some albums and individual photos have been shared with Facebook and Flickr (perhaps that's irrelevant).
Other recent symptoms:
Before I noticed the above issue, I made several changes to my library: tagged faces, merged faces, updated the email associated with faces (to match Facebook login), edited/renamed/deleted various keywords. During this process over a few days, iPhoto did crash once and hung-force-quit another time (I believe during the renaming of keywords). I noticed a few thumbnails that did not reflect their full sized photos - my fault as I had edited the on disk file using an editor outside of iPhoto's knowledge.
So, I backed up the iPhoto library. Then I started iPhoto while holding down "option-Command" and in the First Aid dialog I selected "Repair Permissions". I repeated these steps for "Rebuild Thumbnails" and then "Repair Database". I did not use the "Rebuild Database" option as I figured that might be too invasive. The culmination of these steps resulted in:
     1) Several hundred photos (all of which were previously iPhoto/Trashed) were added to the Recovered Photos folder (I'm not sure that's the exact name).
     2) Several hundred photos randomly added back to various events often to events they were not previously associated with. Most of these were tagged "Photo Stream". I have had other small issues with Photo Stream so it's now disabled since I'm not making much use of it.
     3) Several thumbnails added to events where there is no underlying full size image on disk. Many of these have been found and deleted.
Bottom Line:
     1) How might I fix the missing Face tags? I think the issue is limited to a handful of people and several dozen images.
     2) I spent several hours comparing a backed up iPhoto Library against the "Repaired" Library. Are there tools to:
          a) report on the (in)consistency of the Library (non destructive). I would run this tool regularly to help decide if "first aid" needed to be applied.
          b) evaluate differences between two libraries.
Parameters of my system:
     Macbook Pro, OSX 10.7.4
     iPhoto '11 (version 9.3.2). My photo library probably started with iPhoto 9 and has been incrementally updated since then.
Any help will be appreciated.
Cheers,
Rob

Thanks for answer.
No they are missing in the tags (tag-tree) that were imported from my PSE 6. The tag-category that isn't working is not shown in the new categories: People, Places and Events.

Can I have two versions of the same original live in separate projects?

I am not an Aperature or photography expert.
I scanned in a ton of old family photos with multiple snaphots on a page and in a single file. Then I imported into Aperature, created new versions, one for each snapshot, then cropped each snapshot, so each snapshot is seperate in Aperature. (I could have learned Spanish with all the time that this took.)
Then, I tried to organize the ton of photos into projects and it won't let multiple versions of the same original photo be in separate projects. I found a way to change the filenames through Batch Change, but that didn't fix the problem.
I would like to organize the ton of files, but from what I can tell my only option would be to go back to the scanned files, make copies from Finder as needed, once for each snapshot, reimport into Aperature and recrop each individual snapshot.
Oh my, I have kids and a job and a husband and I like to sleep at night. Is there any easier way to organize the photos?
Thank you for your time.
Carol

Carol,
William Lloyd said it all, but perhaps Kirby Krieger's User Tip will explain a bit more the different uses of albums and projects:
The Well-Trod Path: a Beginner's Guide to how Aperture's major parts inter-relate
Then I imported into Aperature, created new versions, one for each snapshot, then cropped each snapshot, so each snapshot is seperate in Aperature.
You want to find each snapshot separately in Aperture? Perhaps you could explain more, how you want to organize your photos. William pointed out albums to group versions of an image. You could also assign keywords to mark special occasions like birthdays, weddings, etc. You could assign faces to find photos of persons by name. You can use the search field in the browser to search for photos by face, date, keyword, etc. Aperture is really great for accessing images in many different ways. There must be a way to access the images in your Aperture library just like you want to.
Then, I tried to organize the ton of photos into projects and it won't let multiple versions of the same original photo be in separate projects.
That is, how Aperture works. All versions of an image need to be in the same project, because they are sharing the same imported original image file. Aperture tries to save your disk space, by by not creating image files for the edited versions. Versions are just a set of instructions how to produce the rendered image, when you want to edit it or to export it. Unless you are working with the version, it will live in limbo and it will not exist as an image file. So all versions are kept together in the same project with the original image file that is necessary to render them as an image.
Léonie

IPhoto 11 file structure

I had my laptop stolen recently and have my iPhoto library backed up using Carbonite. I have been trying to restore it from Carbonite, however, at the rate it is restoring it will take months to restore. I have a locally backed up version of my iPhoto library from two months ago. What I want to do is just restore from Carbonite photos taken over the past 2 months and then I'll re-add those to the local backup I have. The problem I have is that I'm finding the iPhoto Library file structure really hard to navigate through and work out. Where would I find the photos from the past couple of months (it is under Masters?). Also where is the metadata I would have added when I imported them to iPhoto (file name, faces info, keywords etc.).
I've tried to find online something that explains the file structure without success.
Thanks,
David

the iPhoto library is a SQL database - you can not reconstruct it in pieces - the best you can do is to restore your local i{Photo library and then get the recent photos from the masters folder and import them to the library
Metadata is stored in the database - file names are as imported (iPhoto does not modify file names)
LN

Writing IPTC Metadata to Masters

I know some of this has been discussed, but I've got a few more questions on the topic. To ensure my captions, keywords, and location information is always available no matter what cataloging software I use, I wish to write my IPTC metadata to the master images. Here are my concerns:
1) I have altered the Creator, Headline, Source, Caption, Keywords, Location, City, State/Province, and Country fields - I assume all of these will be written to the masters since they're IPTC standard? Are there length limits for these fields (that is, is there a risk that some will be truncated)? Are there any drawbacks to writing these tags to the masters? (I know many people here don't want their originals touched, but as long as it doesn't affect the quality of my jpegs, I'm fine with it.) Most of my recent photos have GPS metadata - I have not altered these, nor have I added location data to photos that didn't originally have them, so I'm assuming those fields wouldn't be affected?
2) Is there no IPTC-standard field for people shown in a photo? (I know Aperture/iPhoto's Faces is proprietary, and I'm guessing so is Adobe's People field in their XML metadata.) Should I then just assign people's names as keywords, or is there a better way? (This wouldn't be a problem, as relatively few of my photos have human subjects.)
3) I have a library of about 45,000 pictures, all of which (except for about 1400 movies) have had some piece of metadata altered. I've noticed Aperture starts to get slow after I've been working in it for a while - so, should I write the tags in stages, or should I just highlight all of them at one time and let it work? About how long should it take?
4) Finally, I've tested writing the tags to the masters on a few of them, and I've noticed the "date created" shown in the Finder gets changed to the current date and time - Does this mean the entire file was re-created? Would Time Machine have to then re-copy all of them? (My masters total 153 GB, so that might take a while to back up.)
I know this is a lot at once, but it was a fair amount of work to migrate from iPhoto to Aperture (even with Aperture's convenient import feature) since iPhoto's cataloging tools are different from the IPTC standard. I'm contemplating another migration, and I don't want to have to go through all that again.
Thanks in advance.

Thanks all... as I've been digging into this digital asset management concept for a few years now, and there's more to it than I could have imagined!
viskwal: That's about what I figured. Actually, tagging Faces as keywords will be easy for me since I already have a smart album for each person in Faces. (They're in folders by context - that is, classmate, coworker, family member, etc. - just in case, years down the road, I see a name and don't remember how I know that person.)
As for locations, I could go back and locate all my photos from before I had the GPS-equipped camera, but I haven't bothered, so I don't know how you'd save that data. I've also been shooting exclusively jpeg since it's got built-in metadata (and I don't do any post-processing), so I have no experience with RAW.
Michael Hobi: Thanks for the link - I think I'm ok as far as those lengths are concerned. (I have a few long names in the Location field, but that wasn't mentioned there.) As for the write time, that's actually about what I figured - it won't be instantaneous, but at least I'm reasonably sure it won't go on for days. (My original import from iPhoto took 17 hours!)

Should I name each individual picture in an event or just name the event?

I could use some advise from those out there that really know how to organize their photos in iPhoto.
Should I name each individual picture in an event or just name the event? The individual photos all have the typical camera file names (ex: 134-234.jpeg) when imported and in an event, but to be more organized, do most (or some) people re-name each photo in an event AND name the event? For example:
Bob's Birthday Party on Saturday: 25 photos uploaded into iPhoto. I named the event "Bob's 38th Birthday" but all of the 25 photos just have random numbered names. I'd like to know who was in the photos so 10 years from now I can remember who I was standing next to. Keywords for the event would not help (from what I understand) in this instance because I wouldn't know which of those keyword names went with what photo (ex: people's name that were in the different photos), because the keyword is for the entire event...right? Not the individual photo? But aside from keywords...
1.     Should I name every single photo? If yes,...how? ex: "Bob & me next to pool.jpeg" and "Bob and me in kitchen.jpeg"
2.     Is there a "rule" to how long a photo name can be or how to type it" "Bob and me by the pool at carol's house.jpeg" seems ridiculous, but how do you get all the pertinent info for that one photo so you remember who and where.
3.     If I am naming each photo and there are different photos but with the same person do I name it "Bob and me 1.jpeg" "Bob and me 2.jpeg" so two similar photos don't have the same name?
4.      If I go to a concert and have 68 photos are people taking the time to name each one?
My main question is about actually naming photos, and how best to name if there are lots of photos in an event, not keywords, etc. I seem to find a lot of information on keywords and naming events, but not on naming the actual individual photos.
Thanks so much for any advice.
P.S. First time ever posting a question, so please be kind
Using iMac with Mavericks 10.9.2 & iPhoto 11

LarryHN wrote:
Totally wrong way to go about it
You want to use albums and folders not events
Sorry Larry, but I respectfully disagree. Events are a fine way to organize photos. And for me, organizing by event is more natural than using albums and folders.
I do agree that the OP is totally going about it the wrong way. And to that, I'll paste a response I always use for this question:
Here is how I go about using iPhoto:
Import photos.
Delete junk.
Split or combine events as needed. I tend to be an Event minimalist. For example, I don’t make the photos I took of my daughter at McDonald’s an event. Things like that get grouped into a “Winter 2014” event. Christmas photos often span a month or more, from cutting the tree to packing everything up, and they all get lumped into one of three “Christmas” events based on the branch of the family they relate to..
Set Keywords. I try to keep my keyword list to a minimum. For example, I have a keyword for “Vacation”, but I don’t use keywords for the location of the vacation (that’s taken care of with the Places feature). Another example: I have a keyword for “Birthday”, but I don’t have keywords for the person or the year (those are taken care of with the Faces feature, and the fact that all the photos are dated already).
Rate the best as 4 or 5 stars, and if I need to keep a bad photo for some reason, I rate it as 1 star. I don’t bother rating photos as 2 or 3 stars, but you can if you want.
Name the Faces. I only do this with the people I care about and delete the box around people that I don’t care about (this prevents them from showing up as suggestions when you’re viewing a person’s photos).
Set the location. This is very important for travel photos, but is also handy for others as well. If you want a really good reason to set the travel photos, pick a trip, do the work of setting the location of each photo, and then start the Travel slide show. The Travel slide show is really cool!
Now, with all this info set (called metadata in computer parlance), I can use Smart Albums to great effect.
I have a smart album that contains all photos of my daughter that I’ve rated as 5 starts. This album is automatically synched to my iPhone, my wife’s iPhone, my iPad, and our AppleTV. Every time I import a photo into iPhoto and mark my daughter’s face and rate the photo as five stars, the photo is automatically sent to all our devices when we synch. Super easy!
I have smart albums with Christmas photos for each branch of our family. So, when someone comes over for the holidays, I can easily show that part of the family’s Christmas photos on the TV. We don’t just sit around and watch the slide show all night, but the photos are there if people want to look and they add a nice touch to an otherwise empty sheet of dark glass. So, the Jones Christmas smart album has photos from 1972 to present, and only contain Jones family Christmas photos.
That's just a few things to keep in mind. I've found that combining Events and Smart Albums with Faces, Places, Keywords, and Ratings makes finding photos very easy.

Will Aperture Import Metadata from Windows?

I have been using Windws Live Photo Gallery to edit and organize a library of about 100k JPGs. I have added faces, GPS, Keywords, ratings, and captions to the pitcures. All of this information is stored in the metadata of each picture.
I have used iPhoto in the past and would like to move back to my Mac for editing/organizing my library. If my memory is correct, iPhoto only really imprts the keywords and GPS data, not the ratings or captions.
Does Aperture import more of the metadata?
Also, does Aperture support expoting the metadata (Keywords, Ratings, GPS) to the file? I seem to recall iphoto allows you to export the keywords and GPS, but not the ratings.
I was thinking that if iPhoto nor Aperture does not import/export ratings, I could do a work around by selecting my photos by rating and then just add keywords based on those ratings. (one-star, two-star, etc). I could then do a reverse process in Aperture/iPhoto... Select the keywords and then give the photos the ratings.
Am I making any sense?
Mike
BTW, I am using an older 27" iMac i7 with 8GB... Need to update my profile.

Hi Mike. I don't know the answer to your larger question (though you might try with a few images and see what you get). I do know that what you propose here:
Mike Delaney wrote:
I was thinking that if iPhoto nor Aperture does not import/export ratings, I could do a work around by selecting my photos by rating and then just add keywords based on those ratings. (one-star, two-star, etc). I could then do a reverse process in Aperture/iPhoto... Select the keywords and then give the photos the ratings.
works, and works well. I have done this a few times (for ratings as well as for color labels and for other groupings). In practice, it goes quickly. Every "tag" of information that you can translate to a keyword will be preserved, and within the limits of the "moving to" software can be re-assigned.
(Don't get fancy with a keyword outline, though: Aperture flattens any keyword outline on import and leaves you with a simple single-level list of keywords. You can't group your keywords, but with clever naming: e.g. "StarOne", "StarTwo", "StarThree", you can at least have these show next to each other in an alpha-sorted list. Similarly, "ColorRed", "ColorBlue", etc. Although I've not seen any problems recently, I still avoid non alpha-numeric characters, including {space}.)

Faces vs. Keywords

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for