Importing and Exporting Keywords
[Update: Now that Aperture 1.5 is out, keywords have changed significantly. This article was written for keyword management in 1.1]
Aperture keywords can be imported and exported, but it is not obvious how to do this. There are no menu items anywhere to be found, and there is nothing on the inspector panel of the Aperture main window. Instead, bring up the keyword HUD (shift H) and all is revealed:
There, at the bottom of the window are the Import... and Export... buttons. When you export, you'll get a plain text file containing the keywords and tab characters, so make sure whatever editor you use can display tabs correctly. Don't convert tabs to spaces or allow tabs added to the file to be expressed as spaces. The best kind of editor for this is something like SubEthaEdit, or TextWrangler.
Here is TextWrangler's display of part of the file with invisibles turned on so you can see the tabs and newlines:
The tabs are used to indent the text to match the indenting of the keyword hierarchy. TextWrangler will let you move whole blocks of text left and right, subtracting or adding tabs as needed, so this is a very fast way to make large changes to your keyword list. When you are done editing, import the keyword list back into Aperture. The list you import will replace the current list, but none of the keywords already attached to images will be modified.
The other list that can be exported and imported is the metadata button list that appears at the bottom of the Aperture window:
Again, there is no way to do anything with this information through the menus. Instead you access it through the pop-up:
And the following window gives you the import and export buttons:
What you are importing and exporting here is more complex than just a list of keywords. Each button set shown on the left pan consists of a list of keywords shown in the middle pane. Each of those has a hierarchy associated with it from the keyword library shown on the right pane.
When you export the button sets you get a plist file instead of a plain text file. TextWrangler shows it like this:
Again there are a lot of tabs in the file, but this time they are cosmetic. The structure is encoded in the bracketed items: this is an XML file. It's tough to edit this by hand without making mistakes, so you really need an XML editor to do the job. Apple supplies a plist editor (called Property List Editor) with their developer tools that shows a display like this:
Here you can see the nine button sets I have defined and a list of preset keywords that the Actions set defines. On the highlighted line you can see the hierarchy of the keyword I have used (Bombers gallery): it is in Actions > Publish.
Having edited the button sets you can import the new sets into Aperture with the Import button. I have not actually tried this yet. I'm waiting for Aperture to have better and more consistent keyword support, especially for hierarchies before I do anything too complex.
Aperture keywords can be imported and exported, but it is not obvious how to do this. There are no menu items anywhere to be found, and there is nothing on the inspector panel of the Aperture main window. Instead, bring up the keyword HUD (shift H) and all is revealed:
There, at the bottom of the window are the Import... and Export... buttons. When you export, you'll get a plain text file containing the keywords and tab characters, so make sure whatever editor you use can display tabs correctly. Don't convert tabs to spaces or allow tabs added to the file to be expressed as spaces. The best kind of editor for this is something like SubEthaEdit, or TextWrangler.
Here is TextWrangler's display of part of the file with invisibles turned on so you can see the tabs and newlines:
The tabs are used to indent the text to match the indenting of the keyword hierarchy. TextWrangler will let you move whole blocks of text left and right, subtracting or adding tabs as needed, so this is a very fast way to make large changes to your keyword list. When you are done editing, import the keyword list back into Aperture. The list you import will replace the current list, but none of the keywords already attached to images will be modified.
The other list that can be exported and imported is the metadata button list that appears at the bottom of the Aperture window:
Again, there is no way to do anything with this information through the menus. Instead you access it through the pop-up:
And the following window gives you the import and export buttons:
What you are importing and exporting here is more complex than just a list of keywords. Each button set shown on the left pan consists of a list of keywords shown in the middle pane. Each of those has a hierarchy associated with it from the keyword library shown on the right pane.
When you export the button sets you get a plist file instead of a plain text file. TextWrangler shows it like this:
Again there are a lot of tabs in the file, but this time they are cosmetic. The structure is encoded in the bracketed items: this is an XML file. It's tough to edit this by hand without making mistakes, so you really need an XML editor to do the job. Apple supplies a plist editor (called Property List Editor) with their developer tools that shows a display like this:
Here you can see the nine button sets I have defined and a list of preset keywords that the Actions set defines. On the highlighted line you can see the hierarchy of the keyword I have used (Bombers gallery): it is in Actions > Publish.
Having edited the button sets you can import the new sets into Aperture with the Import button. I have not actually tried this yet. I'm waiting for Aperture to have better and more consistent keyword support, especially for hierarchies before I do anything too complex.
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