Have iPhoto keywords been rendered useless?
On the heals of my tip on how to rebuild your Spotlight indexes, I have now noticed that after iLife 06 and some recent updates from Apple, the iPhoto keywords have been rendered completely useless.
Sure, you can open iPhoto and use the internal search feature within to find photos with specific keywords, but you can’t use the system-wide spotlight to search for such things.
This also holds true for the internal media browser within all iLife applications. So, why should I take the time to add keywords to all of my photos? I can’t use them unless I’m actually in iPhoto.
If anyone has any way of helping me out here, please drop a note.
Also, anyone that is using Apple’s Aperture, if you could fill us in on if this same problem persists in Aperture 1.0 as well (Aperture 1.1 is due within the next month I believe).Update 01: This issue mainly occurs when someone reindexes their drive (as I have). If you have photos that were indexed when you had iPhoto 5 installed, they will continue to show up until you reindex your drive. This problem only seems to exist in iPhoto 6, and the latest version of Mac OS.
Update 02: Also of note, the tips on Mac OS X hints (as linked to in the comments on this article) do not fix the problem. Unless of course you have a very small photo library. I have about 16,000 photos in iPhoto (which is about 5% of its advertised capacity), and adding 1 tag to every photo in iPhoto as a way to force Spotlight to index the library, only ends up crashing iPhoto. I’ve sent a few reports, with explicit details, to Apple.
Update 03: In an effort to find as many people with this problem, I’ve added this article to Digg. If you have a Digg account, consider digging this article. I’d like to find as many people with this same issue, so that hopefully we can find a solution, or get Apple to notice the issue.
Update 04: This problem has been confirmed by at least three others that were able to provide screenshots, and nine more that have confirmed via an email without specific details.
Update 05: After investigating this issue with Chris Clark, we’ve been able to determine that it isn’t that iPhoto is not storing the keywords that you set, it is that iPhoto does not store those keywords into the files themselves (via the filesystem), but rather only keeps that information inside its internal database structure. This was not the case with earlier versions of iPhoto, and is in stark contrast to the way Apple recommends these types of applications are built and maintained. Perhaps this is a bug, an error, an oversight, or a change that Apple has made for reasons beyond our comprehension.
This would also explain why older photos that have been “tagged” would still show up in Spotlight searches until a brand new cache has been built. Again, I hope Apple becomes aware of this rather soon, as it has made Spotlight searching for photos completely useless.
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I had similar issues when upgrading to iPhoto 6 from 5. This thread might help.
And on a slightly unrelated note, it seems that this page is crashing Safari for me…
Tauquil on April 2nd, 2006 4:52 pm
Tauquil: Turn off all of your plugins in Safari. Safari + Plugins = CRAP! Actually, I should mention that 90% of the Safari Plugins I’ve used cause Safari to be very unstable.
Colin D. Devroe on April 2nd, 2006 9:46 pm
Same problem here as well. I figured it was just an oversight and did not realize previous versions of iPhoto metadata were searchable via spotlight. I am hoping that Apple will make metadata for photos embedded so that it will remain if accessed on different systems.
Chris on April 3rd, 2006 11:28 am
Chris: Exactly. Chris Clark and I have been able to figure out that, it isn’t that iPhoto is not storing the keywords themselves, it is that iPhoto is not adding the keywords to all of the actual original files. Which would make Spotlight and the Media Browser not find it at all. I’ll update this article…
Colin D. Devroe on April 3rd, 2006 11:30 am
This article has been seeded on Newsvine as well vote for it here and help raise awareness.
Mike Stickel on April 3rd, 2006 12:54 pm
My guess is that Apple does not plan on supporting IPTC Core. That is the spec for embedding metadata into photos. I hope I am wrong though. However, I do think future versions of iPhoto will work with Spotlight. There are rumors that Leopard will have a database file system. If that is the case, I think all files will support a wide variety of metadata but the metadata will not be embedded in the files. Maybe someone will create a plugin though.
As a sidenote, Vista does support IPTC Core.
Chris on April 3rd, 2006 12:58 pm
Chris: Not know much about IPTC I can not say for sure. However, if it is a widely used standard, Apple will (or might already) support it. However, there is no reason I can think of to keep metadata completely separate from the files themselves, since that would make everything application specific, which would negate about 7 years of development that Apple, and many other companies, have been doing.
Colin D. Devroe on April 3rd, 2006 1:02 pm
If the filesystem recognizes the link between a file and it’s metadata then there is no problem storing it seperately. OS X currently has no (built-in) way to write IPTC metadata to a file. There are programs that do though. None are as effiecient for adding keywords as Google’s Picasa. Also, most are not compiled for the Intel processor.
http://holocore.com/?IPTC-OSX
Informator is one program that does embed metadata but it is very slow and buggy on my MacBook.
Chris on April 3rd, 2006 1:12 pm
http://www.hugsan.com/EXIFutils/Features/WhatsNew/whatsnew.html
Exifutils is a command line set of tools for writing and modifying embedded metadata but it’s expensive and slow to use. Someone could potentially use it as a plugin for a GUI frontend to make a keywording program.
Chris on April 3rd, 2006 1:16 pm
I hadn’t messed with iPhoto keywords ever myself and decided to start doing it tonight (using iPhoto 6.0.3 on a G4 Powerbook), and I’m experiencing the exact same problem. Spotlight sees absolutely none of my photos when searching by keyword. I’m reindexing right now, but if your story is accurate, that won’t help.
Is there any news on this front?
Dean on May 18th, 2006 1:29 am
I placed a call to AppleCare today regarding this very issue. All the fixes I had tried didn’t work, and on and on.
I was told that Apple’s engineers are aware of the issue and are working to fix it either in an update to the OS or iPhoto or in the next release.
Hopefully it’ll come as an update, I say.
Kevin Smith on June 23rd, 2006 2:48 pm
I was in this position: no Spotlight searches would find text that had been entered in iPhoto.
After a frustrating 2 hours of trying everything to reindex the Spotlight index and coax it into making use of the iPhoto AlbumData.xml (which is where the text metadata is stored), found…
There is a solution posted here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=2648437�
Following it to the letter fixed the problem completely!
iPhoto 6.0.4
Mac OS X 10.4.7
Reg on July 15th, 2006 5:06 am
I’m assuming this change was about improving speed in a big iPhoto library. Writing keywords into photo files was painful in 5 and seems much faster now.
Steve Bowbrick on September 18th, 2006 8:41 pm