Why didn’t anyone tell me…

I’m now reaching the very end of my tagging for digital photos. I started digital photography in 1998, well before it was ready to be started in reality. Here I am with my monstrous collection of photos now, and managing that collection is a bear. Over the weekend I was able to finish the tagging of just the digital photograph portion of my library – which amounts to most of it.

I was able to finish my smaller runs of tagging (description) and get to the point that I will need to start the ratings and captions. This morning I got mostly through the Edit batch, and will probably finish on the ride home. The rating and caption thing is going to be long, and probably hard. This is because Aperture isn’t really designed to make captioning across many images easy. For instance if I want to type in the caption, consider myself done and move to the next picture, I have to leave the keyboard and go to the mouse to select the next image, and then click the tiny textbox again to enter the next caption. I’m REALLY not looking forward to this. In fact, this might be my main motivation to finally learn AppleScript which would let me ignore the Aperture UI and do it a bit faster. We’ll see.

The remaining library portions – scanned negatives and scanned prints – still need to be tagged. I’ve only sorted them into time periods in my life (school, college, post-college, wedding, just-married). The problem is that there are still way too many duplicates in that section for my taste – sometimes you keep double-prints plus the negative, meaning 3 images in my library that are all the same. It’s annoying to contain that kind of thing, but it has to be done for me to feel done with this. Eventually I’ll need to move this library to “the next library app” and I’d like to have all the duplicate issues worked out before I get there.