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It is Hard Work Tagging Digital Photos.
Last night I finally got done going through my iPhoto library and tagged absolutely every last picture that I have ever taken with a digital camera in the last five years or so. It took some time but all of the 7,377 pictures in my photo library now has at least one tag on it. I just started and selected pictures and dragged them onto the Keyword tag buttons to arrange them by context. The keywords help set up a system of finding a particular photo that you are looking for because you can turn them off and use referanced searches. Once they are tagged it helps to arrange them in albums and to put together slide shows, books, Flickr or use in other programs like iMovie and ComicLife!.
One thing that helps in sorting through untagged photos is to make a Smart Album and set the conditions to "Keyword" "is" "None". That way you get an up-to-date pile of all the unsorted pictures.
The tags that I used were
Family (my folks)
Political (Marches and meeting politicians)
Seattle (On the streets of the Emerald City)
Housing (My old places)
Hipster (Cool spiffy hipster stuff)
Nerd (Hardcore Nerd Stuff)
seattlest (tagged for Flickr if I want to tip off the local blog)
Movie (Short Quicktime movies from my camera)
Kitties (Pictures of cats, we actually have 1,525 pictures of the furry monsters)
IDF (the political class I did)
Friends (Pictures of BBQ eating Bacon)
Kymberly (My GF)
Kymberly's Photos (Her using my the camera)
Me (Shots of me, 99% of them suck)
Food (Shots of stuff that I have made or ordered before eating it, Kymberly thinks this is very weird)
One of the dodgy things about my camera is when you stick in a new pair of freshly recharged batteries the date sets to a the same day when set in the firmware when it was coded in 2004. So I have thousands of pictures that are dated to have been taken on that day in 2004. It would have been good if it could see when it was added to the library but some of the pictures predated me getting iPhoto.
These albums will show up on my iPod and I made an album for images like a Google map that I want on my iPod as a reference. This saves you a bunch of in and paper.
I really do think of Apple as a "Web 2.0" company and I totally do see why creative hipster "arse whole" folk enjoy using a good Macintosh. I could not ever see myself going without the iLife apps or doing digital photography without a program like iPhoto to keep you straight. It is very nice to finally get to the point where all my photos are tagged and it will be easier to keep things organized from now on.
Jake at July 18, 2006 
WebDev
Comments
Much as I love both iPhoto and tag/keyword organization, iPhoto's keyword implementation _sucks_.
Heavily recommended if you might want to use more than, oh, ten keywords (and if you might want it to be _far_ easier to apply or remove them): [iPhoto Keyword Assistant][1]. I find iPhoto virtually unuseable without it.
[1]: http://homepage.mac.com/kenferry/software.html
Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated since iPhoto 6.0.2, and so it won't load with the current 6.0.4 version of iPhoto. Thankfully, someone figured out where to [hack KA to make it work with iPhoto ≥6.0.3][2].
[2]: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060704211413938&query=iphoto
Posted by: Michael Hanscom at July 19, 2006 5:32 PM
