Keyword management

[Adam Kocoloski]

Hi, I’m curious if Nitro’s vision for DAM includes keyword management capabilities? Or is there some recommended alternative?

Currently I find myself flagging a bunch of images and then using the Flagged album in macOS Photos to set the keywords, but that’s a bit of a kludge.

For what it’s worth my use case for keywords is primarily oriented around identifying subsets of photos in the iCloud Shared Library.

[Nik Bhatt]

Unfortunately, Apple prohibits App Store apps from reading or modifying keywords, titles, descriptions, and other user entered metadata. Some apps have made their own keyword systems, but they cannot store the data into the photo library, which means they don’t sync over iCloud, etc.

I plan to add keywords to the Finder-side of things because that doesn’t have that restriction / limitation.

If Apple ever decides to giver App Store apps this ability, then I would add the feature.

By the way, there is a roadmap on the website: https://www.gentlemencoders.com/nitro-roadmap/index.html

[Adam Kocoloski]

What a curious choice by Apple! But that certainly explains the lack of this functionality on the Nitro side.

Thanks for posting and sharing the roadmap, lots of exciting stuff in there 🙂

[Nik Bhatt]

Yes, it’s very frustrating. Apple does this by not providing public APIs for developers to read and write keywords. Instead there are private APIs that are only usable by Apple. Some developers have figured these out. But if an App Store app tries to use those private APIs, the app will be rejected by Apple.

[Joachim Jundt]

I plan to add keywords to the Finder-side of things because that doesn’t have that restriction / limitation.

I’m not sure if that wouldn’t become an overload for me. Currently I do use keywords in finder – just not for photos but for file metadata. And I’m a lousy keyworder: 58% of my images have no keyword at all and if the ones with keywords have all applicable keywords of a keyword catalog of nearly 1200 entries, growing over the past 6 years? I very much doubt so. I’d still be most happy if I’d be able to using the folder > project > album > smart album hierarchy I got used to in Aperture and tried to develop in C1. With the downside that C1’s programmers aren’t interested in giving the users a fulltext search for these structural elements of their own DAM.

I can understand that keywords can be helpful in big databases with more than 1 user. But I catched myself using the AI search of Excire more successful than guessing which keyword would apply to an image I am looking for.

[Nik Bhatt]

There are many ways to organize (or not organize). Some people have existing keywords and keywording systems. It is a popular request.

Some people use hierarchy alone and that’s enough.

Most people probably will not use keywords (I don’t) and that’s fine. AI can also work but has obvious limitations.

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