Hi! Thanks for a great site! I'm thinking about switching from iView Media Pro to Aperture. What I'm curios about is if Aperture has the same abilities to tag photos with all the IPTC data that iView has? And also, is there any good ways to sort photos by people or location. Do I have to use keywords to do that, or is there any dedicated fields for this? I'd like to see a full walk through of all the searching/filtering/tagging capabilities Aperture have, could you point me in the right direction for a great source on that?

Three questions in all. Quick answers: Yes, Aperture can tag with all the IPTC data that iView has. No, it is not possible to sort by person or location like iView, but some sorting is possible. Yes, I can point you in the right direction. See the articles on this site that cover metadata and filtering workflow.

IPTC Tagging

The IPTC tags can most easily be seen in the filter dialog. Select IPTC from the plus pop-up on the filter dialog:

and then click on the IPTC pop-up that appears:

You can also control which IPTC fields appear in the various metadata sets by editing the metadata sets in the Inspector panel. Open the metadata panel with I and pick one of the metadata sets. Then select IPTC at the bottom to get an opportunity to add or remove them from the set:

The batch change dialog (command shift B) also allows the selection of All IPTC in order to make bulk changes to image metadata:

Sorting Features

The sorting features of Aperture are not as comprehensive as iView, and that is a problem. Sometimes it is very convenient to sort all images by person, or city, or some other random metadata.

In the grid view, Aperture allows sorting on only eight pieces of data:

This is a very restricting set. The keywords sort order is not useful because it sorts on the entire comma-separated string of all the keywords applied to an image. So two images each tagged with Bob and Annie will sort differently if they are tagged with other keywords as well. There is no way to tell Aperture to sort on People and have People > Bob and People > Annie be compared to create the sort order.

In the list view, selected by clicking the icon to the left of the sort pop-up:

there are many more options. Any column can be used to sort by clicking on the header (except the tags -- that does not work). Here I sort on aperture:

But I can only sort on one column. So I cannot keep the sort by aperture and also sort by shutter speed.

The list view can be modified too. From the inspector, select the List - Expanded metadata set:

and then add or remove entries. Ensure that the expanded list is used by pressing Command J and checking the view options:

There is set 2 for the list view columns selected as List - Expanded. By adding fields to the list view it is possible to sort on any of the IPTC or EXIF field. If you have only one person in the frame and have used an IPTC field to identify that person, then yes, you can sort by person.

Also note that if you select one of the columns in list view and then change back to grid view, that selection stays:

At least for a little while. If you select away from it, it disappears from the pop-up.

Tags: Q&A, Aperture, IPTC, iView, Keywords