Author Topic: How do the Keywords work?  (Read 27099 times)

Offline davidgordon

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How do the Keywords work?
« on: May 25, 2006, 03:42:24 AM »
In the 'IPTC Stationary Pad' I've opened the Keyword edit window. I already have managed to import a list of keywords which now appear as my 'Master Keywords List' on the right of the window.

I get the impression that I should be able to save lists of keywords and bring those up (perhaps to replace the 'Master' list)? I haven't been able to work out how to do that, so a couple of clues or a pointer to the relevant help file would be appreciated.

What I think I want to do is have a number of keyword lists to use according to the shoot. Say one with "Indusry" keywords, another for "Education".

Or am I missing the point?!

Thanks!

Offline Kirk Baker

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Re: How do the Keywords work?
« Reply #1 on: May 25, 2006, 09:04:20 AM »
In the 'IPTC Stationary Pad' I've opened the Keyword edit window. I already have managed to import a list of keywords which now appear as my 'Master Keywords List' on the right of the window.

I get the impression that I should be able to save lists of keywords and bring those up (perhaps to replace the 'Master' list)? I haven't been able to work out how to do that, so a couple of clues or a pointer to the relevant help file would be appreciated.

What I think I want to do is have a number of keyword lists to use according to the shoot. Say one with "Indusry" keywords, another for "Education".

Use the snapshot button (the button with the lightning bolt on it) to save separate lists of keywords, saving them with names you choose, like "Education" and "Industry".  Use the same button to reload your keyword lists.  To apply keywords to your selected photos, select some keywords from the master list (you can select multiple keywords at the same time) and click on the "<-" button.  The selected keywords will appear on the left list.  The keywords in the left list are what will be applied to your photos.

HTH,

-Kirk

Offline davidgordon

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Re: How do the Keywords work?
« Reply #2 on: May 25, 2006, 09:14:57 AM »
Yes, thanks that does help.

I think I was confused by expecting the snapshot to be of the Current Keyword List, not the Master List. And I expected the name of the Master List to change to that of my saved snapshot...

There's no auto-completion is there, BTW?

Thanks again!

Offline Kirk Baker

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Re: How do the Keywords work?
« Reply #3 on: May 25, 2006, 09:41:02 AM »
Yes, thanks that does help.

I think I was confused by expecting the snapshot to be of the Current Keyword List, not the Master List. And I expected the name of the Master List to change to that of my saved snapshot...

There's no auto-completion is there, BTW?

No, but there is "Code Replacement" which in many ways is far more powerful.

From the still unreleased manual:

Code Replacement is a feature new to Photo Mechanic which speeds up captioning of often-used terms or names like those used in sports photography, but can be used as a method of shorthand for any type of photography.

To use Code Replacement, you must prepare a plain text file in tab-separated format.  You can use any text editor, or a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel™ to generate the text file.  The format of the text file is simple.  It is comprised of two ‘columns’, the first being the ‘Code’ and the second being the ‘Replacement’.  These two ‘columns’ are separated by a ‘tab’ character.  Ideally, you want your codes to be as short as possible while being completely unique.

Here is an example Code Replacement text file used for Basketball (Detroit Dunkers and Chattanooga Choo-Choos):

CC8   Dain Bramage
CC17   Rick Perkins
CC43   Brian Calloway
CC13   Dennis George
CC11   Darrin Green
CC2      Aaron Barnum
...
DD41   Stanislav Zarubezhanin
DD43   Paul Kroyd
DD24   Ken Pierce
DD44   Brian Socoletto
DD55   Wally Flannenbaum
DD13   Victor Zenfliende
...

Some of the player’s names are difficult to spell correctly, even if you are familiar with them.  Code Replacement makes this problem a thing of the past.  All you have to do is get the spelling right once: during the creation of the Code Replacement text file.  Once you have created your text file, you need to tell Photo Mechanic to use it for Code Replacement.  Open the Preferences dialog and click on the IPTC/XMP tab.  Then click on the ‘Code Replacement’ button.  A small dialogue will open that will explain briefly what ‘Code Replacement’ is.  This dialogue has a ‘Choose...’ button on it which will allow you to load your text file.  Once your text file is loaded, you can use ‘Code Replacement’ to speed up your captioning.

Continuing our basketball example, lets say you shoot a game where the Chattanooga Choo-Choos play the Detroit Dunkers.  Later after Ingesting your images you begin to individually caption the keepers and want to identify the players in each of the photos.  Example: you have a picture with Dain Bramage (CC8) breaking past Stanislav Zarubezhanin (DD41) and you can visibly see their jersey numbers in the thumbnail preview of the IPTC Info dialog.  You just type in your codes for each player, surrounded by the ‘\’ character which tells Photo Mechanic to look up the codes and enter their replacements.  Photo Mechanic instantly looks up the replacement text and enters it in place of the \code\ and automatically places the cursor at the end of the replacement so that you can continue typing in the rest of your text.
Code Replacement can help make your captions more accurate and can save time as well: just choose a system of mnemonics to help you remember your codes and the pictures themselves will help you derive the codes.  In our example we chose CC as an abbreviation for the ‘Chattanooga Choo-Choos’ and DD as an abbreviation for the ‘Detroit Dunkers’.  When captioning, we can see that the two players are on the Choo-Choos and the Dunkers, so we can derive the codes from their jersey numbers (8 and 41), giving us CC8 and DD41.

[there would be a graphic here showing Code Replacement in action]

Code Replacement can be used anytime you have commonly entered terms that you tire of entering each time.  Code Replacement works in every text field of the IPTC Info and IPTC Stationery dialogues.

HTH,

-Kirk

Offline gajones

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Re: How do the Keywords work?
« Reply #4 on: May 25, 2006, 06:30:39 PM »
An auto-completion feature would definitely be very useful when adding kewords. Code replacement is great for sports teams as there can be a simple logic to the codes, but when you have a list of several hundred keywords it's not practical.

Offline Kirk Baker

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Re: How do the Keywords work?
« Reply #5 on: May 25, 2006, 08:33:10 PM »
An auto-completion feature would definitely be very useful when adding kewords. Code replacement is great for sports teams as there can be a simple logic to the codes, but when you have a list of several hundred keywords it's not practical.

OK, so where do the auto-completion word lists come from?  The current Master Keywords list?  A text file?

-Kirk

Offline davidgordon

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Re: How do the Keywords work?
« Reply #6 on: May 26, 2006, 12:27:14 AM »
I would expect auto-completion words to come from the Master Keywords List - and by that I think whichever 'snapshot' is loaded at the time. (So I won't get "industry' words appearing when I've loaded and am keywording "education" pictures. It's reasonable easy to load a text file into the Keywords so we get that for free! I think auto-completion would be useful when you just need a handful of words from a long Master List. Rather than scrolling through the list trying to command-click your selection, typing will be faster.

iView appears to add any keyword you enter to a list which it then uses for auto-completion. I think that's the wrong way to do it, I'd prefer to have a "controlled vocabulary".

I'm trying Code Replacement but I'm not sure it's the way to go for me. I'm not sure how I should format the keywords I want in the text file, separated by comma, comma space, semi-colon? At one point I had a list of five words to add which appeared as a single string in Photoshop. Maybe it's not possible to use it for adding multiple keywords?

As far as the "still unreleased manual" goes, there must be a Beta version...?

Thanks!

Offline Kirk Baker

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Re: How do the Keywords work?
« Reply #7 on: May 26, 2006, 07:00:57 AM »
I would expect auto-completion words to come from the Master Keywords List - and by that I think whichever 'snapshot' is loaded at the time. (So I won't get "industry' words appearing when I've loaded and am keywording "education" pictures. It's reasonable easy to load a text file into the Keywords so we get that for free! I think auto-completion would be useful when you just need a handful of words from a long Master List. Rather than scrolling through the list trying to command-click your selection, typing will be faster.

iView appears to add any keyword you enter to a list which it then uses for auto-completion. I think that's the wrong way to do it, I'd prefer to have a "controlled vocabulary".

It is my plan to support a real Controlled Vocabulary, David Riecks' Controlled Vocabulary.  But yes, we could support auto-completion in the keywords field that come from the current Master Keywords list, that shouldn't be too hard to do.

Quote from: davidgordon
I'm trying Code Replacement but I'm not sure it's the way to go for me. I'm not sure how I should format the keywords I want in the text file, separated by comma, comma space, semi-colon? At one point I had a list of five words to add which appeared as a single string in Photoshop. Maybe it's not possible to use it for adding multiple keywords?

For multiple keywords, you're going to want to do it like this:

code1 [tab] keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, etc.
code2 [tab] keyword4, keyword5
...

Quote from: davidgordon
As far as the "still unreleased manual" goes, there must be a Beta version...?

Yes, and even when we do release it, I'll still consider it a Beta version, always in flux since we are always adding features to PM.

-Kirk

Offline gajones

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Re: How do the Keywords work?
« Reply #8 on: May 26, 2006, 07:19:07 AM »
David has it spot on I think, that was more or less the way I envisaged it working...

Offline jjlists123

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Re: How do the Keywords work?
« Reply #9 on: November 29, 2006, 07:07:51 PM »
It is my plan to support a real Controlled Vocabulary, David Riecks' Controlled Vocabulary.  But yes, we could support auto-completion in the keywords field that come from the current Master Keywords list, that shouldn't be too hard to do.

Will support for the Controlled Vocabulary be in the 4.5 release?


Offline Kirk Baker

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Re: How do the Keywords work?
« Reply #10 on: November 29, 2006, 09:05:07 PM »
It is my plan to support a real Controlled Vocabulary, David Riecks' Controlled Vocabulary.  But yes, we could support auto-completion in the keywords field that come from the current Master Keywords list, that shouldn't be too hard to do.

Will support for the Controlled Vocabulary be in the 4.5 release?

Not in the initial release, no.

-Kirk

Offline roysmyth

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Re: How do the Keywords work?
« Reply #11 on: November 30, 2006, 11:02:48 AM »
It is getting very late to add adequate keywording to PM. At a minimum we need:

- auto completion (not code replacement) and the option of making auto-completion case-sensitive
- hierarchy
- option to place just a singe keyword or the keyword plus its parents in the hierarchy
- simple import and export of keyword lists (Suggest standard tab-delimited format which can be edited with text editors and spreadsheet tools, and used in many other applications. Xml could be another option, but only as an additional option. Most of us have mundane tools.)
- multiple keyword lists. A feature that allows a master list and as many sub lists as desired would be useful. Like groups in an address book. Makes it easy to work with just the keywords you need for a specific context but keeps them all in one list to avoid duplicates.

I think we are going to see these features in some new products very soon. These features should be 4.5 and 4.5 should be out by February to avoid a significant loss of market share.

Roy

Offline Kirk Baker

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Re: How do the Keywords work?
« Reply #12 on: November 30, 2006, 11:59:44 AM »
Roy,

It is getting very late to add adequate keywording to PM. At a minimum we need:

- auto completion (not code replacement) and the option of making auto-completion case-sensitive
- hierarchy
- option to place just a singe keyword or the keyword plus its parents in the hierarchy
- simple import and export of keyword lists (Suggest standard tab-delimited format which can be edited with text editors and spreadsheet tools, and used in many other applications. Xml could be another option, but only as an additional option. Most of us have mundane tools.)
- multiple keyword lists. A feature that allows a master list and as many sub lists as desired would be useful. Like groups in an address book. Makes it easy to work with just the keywords you need for a specific context but keeps them all in one list to avoid duplicates.

I think we are going to see these features in some new products very soon. These features should be 4.5 and 4.5 should be out by February to avoid a significant loss of market share.

What new products are these?

Thanks for your feedback,

-Kirk

Offline roysmyth

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Re: How do the Keywords work?
« Reply #13 on: November 30, 2006, 01:16:04 PM »
Hi Kirk,

Lightroom does a respectable job of keywording using a hierarchy and while it won't include parent keywords when exporting metadata to a sidecar file, it does remember the hierarchy within its own database so that selecting a parent keyword will bring up all images with child keywords. It exports the keyword list in a tab-delimited hierarchical form. There have been many requests in the Lightroom beta forum for additional features including those I mentioned, and Adobe seems to listen. I think we'll see some nifty keywording features in the first production release. Lightroom uses XMP and will be compatible with Bridge and Photoshop.

Aperture is improving too. XMP support is coming soon. Maybe that means OSX will even support XMP! Aperture has a way to go (in some respects it seems less capable than the beta of Lightroom), but Apple is committed to making it a good product.

Now that Microsoft has purchased iView, I expect that there will be major upgrades. iView brought a lot of expertise to Microsoft and Microsoft provides the deep pockets iView lacked.

These three products each seem to have the goal of being all that one needs for ingest, review, adding metadata, and a host of other functions. Today PM does many things better than any of the these products. I like its speed and lack of frills. But the world is changing quickly and 4.5 is still only a promise with an unspecified release date.

Roy

Offline Kirk Baker

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Re: How do the Keywords work?
« Reply #14 on: November 30, 2006, 02:17:09 PM »
Hi Roy,

Lightroom does a respectable job of keywording using a hierarchy and while it won't include parent keywords when exporting metadata to a sidecar file, it does remember the hierarchy within its own database so that selecting a parent keyword will bring up all images with child keywords. It exports the keyword list in a tab-delimited hierarchical form. There have been many requests in the Lightroom beta forum for additional features including those I mentioned, and Adobe seems to listen. I think we'll see some nifty keywording features in the first production release. Lightroom uses XMP and will be compatible with Bridge and Photoshop.

Aperture is improving too. XMP support is coming soon. Maybe that means OSX will even support XMP! Aperture has a way to go (in some respects it seems less capable than the beta of Lightroom), but Apple is committed to making it a good product.

Now that Microsoft has purchased iView, I expect that there will be major upgrades. iView brought a lot of expertise to Microsoft and Microsoft provides the deep pockets iView lacked.

These three products each seem to have the goal of being all that one needs for ingest, review, adding metadata, and a host of other functions. Today PM does many things better than any of the these products. I like its speed and lack of frills. But the world is changing quickly and 4.5 is still only a promise with an unspecified release date.

Thanks for the rundown.  I can tell you that adding a Controlled Vocabulary keywording interface is high on my list.  A column-view browser for the Windows version is being written as we speak, but it will likely not be done in time for me to write the Controlled Vocabulary keywording interface on top of it and get  PM 4.5 out in the near term.

I have added a floating Keywords panel that will be in the initial release and it does have some of your desired features, but it is not hierarchical.  That's what I want the column-view browser for.  I don't like Tree-view interfaces for strongly hierarchical data since you end up spending so much time expanding and collapsing and scrolling horizontally.

I don't have a release date for you, but I promise we are working hard toward a release and we will release it when it is ready.

-Kirk