Single keystroke keywording

[devenh]

Here is a suggestion to improve keywording.  My usual workflow is to assign broad keywords to all the photos in a shoot.  As I go through and rate the photos I would like to be able to add photo specific keywords with a single keystroke instead of the multiple keystrokes & mouse clicks now required to open the Edit Keywords or Structured Keywords dialog boxes (so many keystrokes that it is not practical to do when working with hundreds of photos).

I think this feature is really quite comparable to color and star ratings, and almost as important.  Ratings and keywords help you find photos, and when you have tens of thousands of photos, this is very useful.

Just like ratings, this feature should be available throughout PM.

The user would be able to assign keywords to keys, like:

A Apple
B Berry
C Carrot
D Delicious

If the user typed a B, then Berry would be appended to the keywords. 

There probably should be some way of removing a keyword (for instance, if you accidently typed B).  One option would be that if you typed B and Berry was already a keyword, then Berry would be removed.  Another option would be Ctrl+B or Ctrl+Alt+B.

Letter assignments could be saved in templates so the user could load a template that best suited the shoot.

One issue is what if a keyword assignment conflicts with existing PM keyboard assignment?  I would suggest that the user could enter into a keywording mode via a toggle key and once in the keyword mode that some visual cue be displayed to indicate that the keyword mode has been entered.  Any keyword letter assignments not used would continue to implement the normal PM function (e.g. in the Contact Sheet if no keyword were assinged to E, then E would still open the editor when in keyword mode).

Deven

[Kirk Baker]

Deven,

Here is a suggestion to improve keywording.  My usual workflow is to assign broad keywords to all the photos in a shoot.  As I go through and rate the photos I would like to be able to add photo specific keywords with a single keystroke instead of the multiple keystrokes & mouse clicks now required to open the Edit Keywords or Structured Keywords dialog boxes (so many keystrokes that it is not practical to do when working with hundreds of photos).

I think this feature is really quite comparable to color and star ratings, and almost as important.  Ratings and keywords help you find photos, and when you have tens of thousands of photos, this is very useful.

Just like ratings, this feature should be available throughout PM.

The user would be able to assign keywords to keys, like:

A Apple
B Berry
C Carrot
D Delicious

If the user typed a B, then Berry would be appended to the keywords. 

There probably should be some way of removing a keyword (for instance, if you accidently typed B).  One option would be that if you typed B and Berry was already a keyword, then Berry would be removed.  Another option would be Ctrl+B or Ctrl+Alt+B.

Letter assignments could be saved in templates so the user could load a template that best suited the shoot.

One issue is what if a keyword assignment conflicts with existing PM keyboard assignment?  I would suggest that the user could enter into a keywording mode via a toggle key and once in the keyword mode that some visual cue be displayed to indicate that the keyword mode has been entered.  Any keyword letter assignments not used would continue to implement the normal PM function (e.g. in the Contact Sheet if no keyword were assinged to E, then E would still open the editor when in keyword mode).

You do know that the Keywords panel and Structured Keywords panel can both be accessed outside of the IPTC dialogs?  They are "Utility" windows and float above the Contact Sheet.  You can interactively use these dialogs without closing them. You could easily create a snapshot for the sets of keywords you want to apply and then call them up from the snapshot button.  So it would at most take two clicks to apply a set of keywords.

Your method seems like it requires a lot of setup and memorization of which key does what.  I would rather have a floating panel of macro buttons that you can click on to apply a single keyword or a group of keywords.  They could in addition have keyboard shortcuts, but at least the text on the buttons would give you an idea about what will be applied.

-Kirk

[devenh]

The Structured Keyword panel is fine for setting keywords for a large number of shots, but it takes way too many keystrokes to enter single keywords for an individual photo.

The Keywords panel is better, but still too many mouse clicks and keystrokes.  In Windows, I cannot access the Keywords panel when using the Preview window.

Maybe you could take the Keywords panel and make is accessible from the Preview window and enable the applying of keywords by typing the first letter of the keyword (or as many characters as necessary to uniquely select the keyword)?

Try keywording a couple thousand photos in a day (I'm not talking about bulk keywording, I'm talking about applying specific keywords to each photo individually) and you'll quickly appreciate the savings of mouseclicks and keystrokes!!  I really think this would be a powerful feature.

Deven