For the longest time, I've wanted to figure out the best way to add keywords to my extensive library. I know in theory how to do it, but I have never actually made a concentrated effort to use this very important and powerful feature in Aperture.

Keywording gets even more important as your archive grows, making it easy to find specific images years down the road. Stock shooters will tell you that efficient keywording will make them money, since buyers will search for specific images by keyword, and if your image fits the bill but does not contain the specific keyword, it will never be called up for consideration.

There are various ways to add keywords in Aperture, and once you’ve got them into your Keyword HUD, it’s not hard to embed them into your images. For me, it was having a good system for adding keywords quickly, so I would have a library of words that made sense for my work.

Adding keywords to your keyword list one at a time is easy, but for creating a base list of keywords, a better way is to use the text-edit application, and then import a list of keywords directly into Aperture.

In a word processing application like Pages or Microsoft Word, I create a list of keywords. The important thing here is to save the file as a text- edit file, which has the suffix “txt”. If you’re using Apple’s Pages, simply export the keywords list you make as a text only file.

I wanted to use the keyword hierarchy to make a set of keywords for my upcoming trip to Rwanda, so I can easily create a button set and quickly add keywords from the browser.

I then thought of a bunch of keywords that I think will be valuable down the line. There are two types of keywords; “Controlled”, which are descriptive like landscape, people etc; and “Inspirational”, which are more evocative words like joy, happy, etc.

It’s important to click return and then tab between keywords so that Aperture will take the list you make, and put it into the Keywords HUD in the same way.

I then save the document in the “text only” format, to be imported into the Keyword Hud. Shift H will call up the Keyword Hud.

Click on Import and find the text only list to import it.

You will see your list in the Keyword HUD.

To make this a new button set, I hit + under button sets and name this set Rwanda. I then drag the keywords from the library on the right into the contents. Click OK and it’s done.

To create this as my button set in the browser, I simply hit Shift D to display the Keyword Controls, and from the drop down menu I find my new keyword set “Rwanda” and there they are, ready to add to the new work.

The sooner you make keywording part of your workflow, the better it will be to find specific images years from now. Now I just need to take my own advice…