It may be laborious, but key wording your images will make it
faster to find them
Adobe Bridge, the image browser that ships with Photoshop
and the Creative Suite, is an excellent cataloguing tool and you can use it to
browse all the images on your Mac. Use the slider at the bottom to scale
thumbnails to any size, hit the spacebar to view any image full screen, use the
left/right cursor keys to move to the next and previous image, and click on any
full screen image to zoom in to a 100% view and then use the cursor keys to
view other photographs at the same magnification, in the same location within
the image.
However, none of this makes sense if you can’t find the
images you want to work with - and it all comes down to key wording. Like
weeding the garden, grouting your bathroom tiles and doing your tax return,
the business of creating, assigning and managing keywords is one you’ll keep
putting off until it’s a rainy afternoon and you have nothing better to do. The
rewards are tremendous, though: suddenly you’ll be able to find any images on
your Mac in an instant, and the boost to your productivity will greatly
outweigh the tedium of the creation process.
Many users never use keywords, and a glance at the
default keyword panel is enough to see why. It contains three events, two
people and five cities. As a curious Bridge user, you might try clicking on the
name Ryan and then, because nothing seems to happen, double-clicking on Ryan.
Again, nothing will happen. Unless you happen to have a friend called Ryan, of
whom you have photographs with applied keywords, there will be no images on
your Mac that match the keyword. The same applies to the cities and the
events. The best approach is to delete all the default keywords so you can
start again with real ones.
If you use images from photo libraries, you’ll find that
most of the images are supplied with keywords embedded in their metadata, and
Bridge can read these with no further prompting. However, you’re likely to find
that many of these keywords are irrelevant to you. For example, this image from
this PhotoDisc collection includes valuable keywords such as Woman’, ‘adult’,
and - rather confusingly - both ‘european’ and ‘american’. These are terms you
might well search for. It also includes phrases like ‘annoyed’, ‘fed up’, ‘pouting’
and ‘arms folded’, which you’re unlikely to think of seeking out; and
references to the original location, such as ‘CD98’, ‘22866PPW’. The trouble is
that this list of keywords is so long it can be hard to find the ones you want.
picture search
A better solution is to create a new category, such as ‘My
keywords’. Do this by pressing the + button at the bottom of the keyword panel.
Now, create a batch of keywords that match the sort of image you’re likely to
search for, such as images of men, women, people shot from behind, people in
profile, room locations and soon. It’s best to use a single term ‘man’,
‘woman’, ‘behind’ - for ease of reference. To make a new sub-keyword, hit the
icon showing a + with a down ward arrow pointing to it to add all your words
within the ‘My keywords’ category.
You can create additional sub-categories within this if you
want to make the process even neater. So, for example, you could create a
category called ‘People’ and then move all the people-related sub-categories
into this one.
To apply keywords to your images, select each image in turn
and check the keyword that applies to it.
Alternatively, you can select a bunch of images - such as a
load of shots of women - and check the ‘woman’ keyword, and it will be applied
to all of the selected images. However you go about it, though, assigning
keywords is a laborious process, but it really is worth it in the long run.
Once your keywords have been assigned, you then need to know
how to search for them. Surprisingly, it’s not as straightforward a process as
you might expect. Ideally, you’d just double-click on a keyword in the list to
find all instances of that keyword, but it doesn’t work that way.
First, you need to be in the folder you want to search - or
at the top level of your Mac if you want to search your entire hard disk. The
breadcrumb trail at the top of the Bridge window will show you the path to the
current folder. Again, you might think that typing the search term into the
text field in the Keyword panel will search for that keyword. In a way, it
does, but it only searches for the keyword itself, not the images to which it
has been assigned.
The two methods are to Ctrl-click on a keyword, which opens
a dialog asking where you want to search and what you want to search for, with
the keyword on which you Ctrl-clicked helpfully already inserted for you.
Alternatively, you can use the Cmd-F shortcut, but if you do this you’ll have
to type in the keyword for which you want to search - the text field will
default to displaying the last-used search term.
It’s all a little clumsy, really. Fear not, though, as
there’s a better way, which is to create Smart Collections. To do this, choose
Window > Collections to open the panel, then click the New Smart Collection
button at the bottom of the panel - it’s the icon showing a briefcase with a
gear attached. This opens the Smart Collection dialog, in which you can type
the criteria for which you want to search. Although you’d normally search for a
keyword that ‘contains’ the search term - and this is the default position -
you might want to modify it based on context: here, for instance, we’re
searching for keywords that ‘start with’ man, so they don’t turn up images
tagged with ‘woman’ as well.
You can use this dialog box to specify which folder or disk
you want to search, and you can add multiple criteria. For example, if you have
photographs of people categorised in two ways - men and women, and standing,
running and sitting -you can add several keywords together to search for just
sitting men, for example.
Creating Smart Collections means that every time a new image
has these keywords applied, it will automatically be added to the collection.
Now you can work with your Keywords panel out of sight until you need it, and
just the Collections panel on view. All you have to do is to double click one
of the Smart Collections in the list and all images whose keywords match those
criteria will be found in an instant - it really will speed up your workflow.
