Fraser Speirs Cocoa and Photos

Intimidating Ontologies

I was talking to my photo buddy Eric Wyllie the other night. We were chatting over some of the things I had written in my Aperture/Lightroom comparison and were comparing our practices in Aperture, which we both use.

Eric’s heavily into keywording, but I’m just…not. I’ve never really known why I couldn’t get into it, but last night I realised: Aperture’s beautiful hierarchical keywording system paralyses some part of my brain. I can’t bring myself to add copious tags, Flickr-style. I have to worry about where they fit in the hierarchy, whether the “Greenock” tag really belongs in the /Travel/UK/Scotland hierarchy or somewhere else or, indeed, whether “UK/Scotland” should be under /Travel and not, say, /Home or some such.

See? I can’t live with disorder and I can’t cope with the demands of maintaining order. Actually, that pretty much sums up my life.

Update: A couple of commenters have mentioned how frustrating it is that FlickrExport uses the entire keyword hierarchy path to fill out a photo’s Flickr keywords. That’s just the default, and there’s a preference: Change the “Fill Flickr Tags From:” preference from “Full Aperture Keyword Hierarchy” to “Image Tags Only” and only the leaf tags in the tree will be used.

You definitely want to check out the metadata articles at Bagelturf.

http://www.bagelturf.com/aparticles/metadata/

That’s hilarious. I’ve got pretty much the same mental block. I *do* keyword, but it’s not as free-flowing as it is with Flickr. And I also get hung up on “Dogs” vs. “dogs”. Grrrr. To make matters worse, Aperture occasionally has a brainfart and loses the hierarchy, so I end up with MINI at multiple levels.

Glad I’m not the only one.

Yes, that Bagelturf guy has some interesting stuff on his site

Better than keywording is captioning. The problem with keywording is that there is a temptation to worry about creating consistency, planning for the future, not duplicating things etc. It’s like trying to organize a chest of drawers when you have more kinds of things than you have drawers and you know that you will have to accomodate more things in the future that you’ve never even heard of. Keywording really exists to help other people.

So caption instead. Aperture allows you to layer captions. Caption everything with “Beach trip with Brian and Jan”, then add “In the car”, “On the beach”, “In the sea”, and “Evening bonfire” as appropriate. Then caption some of those with “Down the winding path” and others with “Falling into the water”, adding “Silly face”, “Too much beer”, and “Not enough beer” to others.

Captions are far richer and will capture much more of what is going on. Do you really have keywords for Silly, Face, Beer, Beach, Too much, Not enough, Winding, Path, etc.? They’re not noun-bound as keywords tend to be. And there is no structure. Why should there be? No use for it. Captions are there to help you. Think of them as evidence, not proof.

I don’t like the way the hierarchical keywords turn into tags in FlickrExport. I am always deleting the parents.

Indeed! I think the big problem is that it really is setup to encourage you to predefine your keywords. Who in the right mind can do that? Professionals who’ve done it for stock agencies for years, maybe. But even for them I suspect that’s what the agency does…

It’s the little things. No auto-complete, so you can enter a new keyword, but you get no help to find out if you had a similar one already.

When you reorganize the keywords (which you are going to do because it REALLY WANTS YOU TO) then it keeps coming up with this useless dialog trying to make you care how many pictures you had with that keyword already. Similarly, if I remove a keyword from all pictures, why doesn’t it go away in the Keyword HUD? Because they want you to predefine them! Crazy.

And there’s the problem Ted mentions with how FlickrExport uses the keywords…

Fraser: “A couple of commenters have mentioned how frustrating it is that FlickrExport uses the entire keyword hierarchy path to fill out a photo’s Flickr keywords. That’s just the default, and there’s a preference”

Sounds like a good reason to make that a control that’s right there in from of the user when they press the upload button.

That’s one of the major wins of Lightroom for me; it actually makes intelligent use of the IPTC meta data. So I don’t need to worry about keywording to handle locations or camera metadata. (Hello, Aperture, can you show me which photos I took with my 170-500mm lens, please?)

On the other hand, I’ve switched back to Aperture again, for two reasons:

* Kick-ass export to Flickr.

* It better matches my workflow. Lightroom was particularly weird about stacking things in a way I could never fit my head around.

@Steve: “Sounds like a good reason to make that a control that’s right there in from of the user when they press the upload button.”

My thinking when making it a preference was that people would generally work in one mode or another. I didn’t really think that people would frequently need both options.

@Fraser: My thinking when making it a preference was that people would generally work in one mode or another. I didn’t really think that people would frequently need both options.

They do need both options, but not frequently. Probably just once when they start to use the plug-in. This is a tricky user-interface problem. You don’t want to bombard a new user with choices, but at the same time, when they first start using the software is really the best time to make the alternatives clear.

One way around this may be to have a disclosure triangle that hides this and other options. Default to the options being visible. Once hidden they stay hidden until the user wants them.

Fraser:

You say “That’s just the default, and there’s a preference: Change the “Fill Flickr Tags From:” preference from “Full Aperture Keyword Hierarchy” to “Image Tags Only” and only the leaf tags in the tree will be used.”

Sorry if I’m being dumb but I can’t find any UI to set prefs. Where is it?

Thanks, DAVE

Dave, there’s a Preferences button (not in the Lite version) at top-right next to Log Out.