Hi,
I sent the following last week in a reply to Kirk in a different topic on the General Discussions section. As there were no responses to that, and I feel it's an important issue, I thought I'd repost it here with a more applicable subject heading. Hope this is OK.
Photo Mechanic is a great program at the moment for captioning, editing, renaming, etc. But it's keywording abilities are seriously lacking. At the moment I do all my captions & edits in PM & then have to copy my selected photos to a folder that I open in Adobe Bridge to do the detailed keywording. In Bridge, I have a list of all my keywords in a column on the left and simply can select whichever images I choose then click the checkboxes next to each keyword to apply those keywords to the images
Have you tried the new Keywords Editor? You can very easily add a long list of master keywords, select portions of them and copy them to your photo. Done with the IPTC Stationery Pad means you can keyword in bulk.
If you still find the Keywords Editor lacking, it would be useful if you could suggest how to improve it.
-Kirk
I tried the Keywords Editor in PM, the problem I found with that is that you can only open it from the IPTC Stationery Pad, then select the keywords, click the arrow button to copy them to the current keywords list, click ok, then click apply stationery to selected. Too many stages. Also, when I then move on to the next batch of images to keyword, the previous keywords are still there and I have to first delete them before starting over again with the keyword list.
My suggestion for improving keywording, would be to be able to keep the Master Keyword List open - either in a separate scaleable window, or as a collapsible column on the left or right of the contact sheet - and be able to select the image/images to keyword and simply click or double-click on the keywords in the Master Keyword List to apply them directly to those images. Ideally, for this stage, one wouldn't even need to go to the IPTC Stationery Pad.
Paul Smith
