Keyword Assistant is little plugin that improves iPhoto's keyword handling for iPhoto versions prior to iLife '08. it lets you enter keywords in an auto-completing text field, like the 'To:' field in your email client. It does some other stuff too, which you can read about in the features section.
What's that I hear you saying?
Keywords? I don't use keywords.
Ah, see, that's a good reason to install Keyword Assistant.
Putting aside the question of effort, it's easy to see why it would be good to have your photos tagged. Finding old images is a serious problem in a large photo library. If your photos are labeled with terms that come to mind naturally, then it's easy to search for a shot you remember. For personal libraries, just tagging each shot with the names of people appearing in it is a huge help. Other users tag for their newspaper or yearbook, or for posting at flickr (via FlickrExport).
Okay, so it would be good to have my photos tagged. Why might I want Keyword Assistant?
There are two main reasons:
If you have a lot of photos, you need a fair number of keywords; otherwise too many photographs are associated with each key.
The built in interface requires that you hunt through the entire list of keywords every time you want to assign a tag. KA lets you avoid that effort when you already know what tags you want. If you tag with the terms you think of when you see the photo, then you'll usually know what tags you want. Use the built-in interface when you do want to see the full list.
Your milage may vary, but for many users KA crosses a usability threshold. In some sense, there isn't anything you can do in KA that you can't do in iPhoto. But if you won't do it in iPhoto, then it doesn't matter.
KeywordAssistant.NetService
to /Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/NetServices/Bundles/
.
There's no need to create iPhoto.app
, that directory is the iPhoto application itself.
Right click on iPhoto and choose "Show Package Contents" to open the iPhoto.app directory.
~/Library/InputManagers/SIMBL
~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL
/Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/NetServices/Bundles/KeywordAssistant.NetService
(version 1.8.2 and up).
/Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/PlugIns/KeywordAssistant.bundle
(version 1.5 through 1.8.1).
~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/KeywordAssistant.bundle
(version 1.4 and older).
ka new keyword
.select
command uncallable.
(We were linking AppKitScripting.framework
which has its own select
command.)