Some Adventures With Keywords

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.