Meta-data mayhem
With Tiger coming out next year, I figured I’d get an early start on tagging everything taggable with Meta-data between now and then. My first project; iPhoto. Currently I have just over 9,000 photos within my iPhoto library; and although I plan on getting rid of some along the way - I am sure this is going to be quite the undertaking. I gave it a go recently, and after about 1 1/2 hours of tagging, I managed to get 250 or so photos properly meta-tagged with what each photo contains. So, you can see that I will be at this awhile.
I’ve been figuring out my meta-data tagging process as I go, since it was nearly impossible to figure out the proper structure before hand. Here are a few things I’ve come up with, which might be of some use to any of you who are doing something similar.
Family Photos
A vast majority of my photos are just that, family photos, which consist of reunions, visits, vacations, etc. etc. So how can I keep them as searchable as possible, without creating redundancies which will make filtering practically impossible? Easy, it’s something I like to call timeline naming. The structure of your photo’s meta-data should consist of the following (at the very least).
- Location or Event
- Content description (left to right*)
- Nicknames for persons/content within
- Timeline information#
* I write the content description from left to right because that is the direction which I think is best, especially since I write in that same direction. As far as the meta-data is concerned, this matters not.
# The way I handle timeline information does not necessarily have to do with a date in time, since iPhoto stores that itself anyway, but rather a way of filtering out the contents of an image based on content timeline. I am sure this is making little or no sense to you, but I’ll try to give you an example of this.
I have 3 sisters, each of which are currently married. I have pictures in my library from pre-marriage, the actual wedding, and now their married lives. How do I keep these straight? Well, I could easily add some text stating married, not-married, wedding. This would do a decent job, but being that I have 3 sisters, 2 brothers, my parents and myself in the library with very similar images, I think the way I’ve come up with works far better.
One of my sister’s names is Katherine, and she was married in 1992. The date of the marriage matters not, since the way I keep track of this is by the name which I call her within the meta-data tag. For instance, if I have a picture of her from when she was a child at a fair let’s say, I would write the following meta-data tag: Fair Name, Katherine, Child, Ice-cream, Day, Summer.
Ok, I’ve now named location, content, state of content (child), content (ice-cream), Timeline information and content timeline because I did not use her married name in the photograph. If it were a picture of her after she was married, I would have put Katherine Black. If it were of her during her Wedding, I would have put Katherine Black and wedding.
Now, when I want to create a smart album, I just have to use the rules of:
- Contains: Katherine
- Does not contain: Black
- Does not contain: Wedding
Or a variation of the above. If you have any suggestions for this process, or if you have a better way totally, please share.
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