Let’s assume that you have not been that diligent with the keywords. There is plenty you can do and learn from the EXIF assuming you are shooting a digital camera. I love not having to take notes anymore. Not only that but all of that is in a database. Here are a couple of ideas that I use every once in a while to explore my photographs, my habits, and preferences over the long term using EXIF focal length and lens model data.

I love to search my entire library using the EXIF focal length field. Actually I use the 35mm equivalent field since I shoot with two different sized sensors. Typically I will use the range option in the search HUD so that I pickup all of the shots that are close to what I am looking for. As a for instance using a “in the range” search between 17 and 21 on the “Focal length (35mm) EXIF field will give me all of the ultra-wide shots used on both my DX and FX bodies as well as all of the lenses that I happen to have used no matter whether they were fixed or zoom.

I find it incredibly instructional to understand my shooting habits and preferences for a lot of different reasons, especially now that I use a lot of zooms in day to day work. I can easily tell you what lenses I use constantly, but I would have a hard time telling you what focal length regions they happen to be set at. You can use this in a lot of different ways in combination with the other EXIF like shutter speeds, apertures, as well as subjective evaluations of the images shot. For instance, I wrote about rethinking Nikon’s new 50mm AFS f1.4 lens a while back. One of the things that spurred me to do this was searching my library for “Focal length (35) in the range 40 to 60 and the range 70 to 85. What I found was astonishing.

If you would have asked me if I use a “normal” focal length I would have said that I do but I found that on both my DX and FX bodies I use it way more than I thought I did and an unusually large percentage of my higher rated shots happen at that focal lenth. Almost an equal number of images shows up between 70 and 85 on both DX and FX formats. What’s more is a quick look at Aperture’s shows me at F2.8 a lot on lenses that happen to have and F2.8 maximum aperture. As I evaluated the images shot at F2.8 it became appearent to me that the choise of that aperture was not only due to shooting conditions but an equal number of times for aesthetic reasons.

Wow, I have an old AF 50 F1.4 but I wasn’t using it on either FX or DX – after careful thought and consideration the obvious answer was because it was more flexible to not have to change out lenses. Looking at all of the situations I could definitely see that that was true in some of them but more often than I would have guessed that focal length at normal on FX or short tele on DX would have been great for the entire shooting session. The real reason I never put the old 50 on any of my current bodies was that it was not AFS making shifting between auto and manual focus a pain, making auto focus slow, and having a horrible touchy iffy feel to manual focus. I ordered an AFS 50 F1.4 that week. I imagine when I do a search down the road that lens will see an amazing amount of use on both FX and DX bodies.

If you happen to go the other way – say slightly wide to normal the new AFS 35 may be a better decision. In any case learning preferences, actual habits, aesthetics, etc by using searches on your image library is a great way to do learn things about your photography and guide both purchasing decisions and behavior. The reason I will probably not go with the AFS 35 myself is because I shoot FX and DX, the 35 is DX only. After thinking about that for a bit and the number of “normal” focal length images shot on DX that were for low light situations I decided that I will probably be shooting those on FX going forward and the 50 was the better decision for me. If I shot a D200 or D300 or any DX body exclusively I would by the 35 AFS in a heartbeat.

From a behavior stand point I can also show you what lenses and focal lengths you do not use much. This could be due to subject matter, due to taste, or due to habit and a weakness of vision at a particular focal length. For those focal lengths I like to assign myself mini-projects to shoot at that focal length (or range) for an extended period of time without resorting to ways that I happen to “see” a subject. I find that doing this is a great learning and growth experience. I rarely find that it is the subject matter that is the issue. More often than not is sort of “writer’s block” and lack of ability to visualize a subject through at a particular perspective.

I call this using your metadata proactively, prior to Aperture, Lightroom, Photo Mechanic, iView, etc. I used metadata, or notes, whatever you want to call it much more reactively when questioned about details of a particular image – I would look it up. Using your metadata proactively as a learning or a creativity tool or just to weigh future purchases focuses more on overall shooting habits and behavior than it does details about a single image. In other words looking at all of the data first and images that have that data in common vs. looking at the image and then looking at the data behind it.

If anyone found this remotely useful I would be happy to let you know some of the wacky things I do to generate ideas with keywords. Just post a comment and let me know.

RB

1. I either want Adobe’s RAW procesng engine and camera profiles or I want Apple to do something at least as good. I am a Nikon shooter and the state of afairs in NEF processing in Aperture sucks. Screw debating about the merits of this and that, screw pixel peeping. I like the color I get from NX2 and now from ACR. I like knowing how my WB is going to interact with color. Apple’s RAW engine has gone nowhere in most respects with NEF’s. I look at a new camera body the way I used to look at a new film back in the day – A giant pain in the ass. Apple your NEF processing blows and I am sick and tired of having to screw around to get my color the way I want it. See the image at the top of the post – that is NX2 picture control standard – here is the Aperture default.
2. Aperture’s keyword and metadata tools were freaking great – back in version 1.0 too bad they have gone absolutely nowhere. For god’s sake keyword hierarchies are great. To freaking bad Apple can find their way clear to find a freaking way to freaking put a freaking G.D. check-freaking-box to embed all of the freaking hierarchy in exported images. This sucks. Screw this I am freaking tired of using my piece of freaking crap script to do this in a backwards dumb ass way. While you are adding the check box think about doing something innovative too. Like maybe keyword synonyms, maybe one upping Lightroom and allowing you to embed not only the primary hierarchy but all of the synonyms for all of the keywords too. Now this would be a huge win for people that actually shoot stock. Heck it’s great as a search tool too. WTF Oh and give some real support for XMP – it is amazing how easy it is to get out of Aperture why not make it easy to get XMP in and not just once but some sort of sync mechanizm.
3. Printing is and has been hopelessly broken since V2. Let’s add to the fact that the printing features are not even useful for anything but a print either. We are talking about Aperture prints going wonky without rhym or reason. Yes I know what I am doing. Yes I have a backwards ass way of fixing it by trashing this and that and then waving some chicken bones to get printing to work again but again WTF? Let’s assume that half of the printing issues that come up on the support forum are idiots that have no idea what they are doing. Okay that’s 6,349 per day divided by 2 for the idiot factor and we’ll round down for the anecdoteal factor we’re left with 3000 issues per day. This is broken. Hey while you are at it take a look at Lightroom printing.
4. Please let me select and manipulate more than one freaking project at a time in the inspector, please, please. I promise if I accidently delete more than one instead of accidently deleting only one I will not call support and blame you guys.
5. Give the book tool some love. I was a great start with V1 but has also gone nowhere. It still has potential and may be the only reason I still use Aperture but…
6. Gimme some local adjustmens like Lightroom only way better.
7. Gimme a really good surprise like Photomagico integrated only better. Like a way way better slideshow and a way not only to show them but output them to a bunch of different places really easy. Sort of a book tool for slideshows, you know Photomagico integrated only better.
8. Either get rid of the web tools or make them do something useful and really cool. Not like iWeb, iWeb sucks. Gimme some web tools that really really help somebody that does photography and web stuff more than like twice a year.
9. Not that I am a big HDR fan but you would surprise everyone if you gave the world a reall kickass state of the art and easy to use HDR toolset integrated with Aperture and maybe some stitching stuff to go along with it.
10. Although not really on my make or break list I will through in a bone for some additional file management and syncronization features. Just make sure that if you must include some idiotic mobile me sync crap that you help the rest of us that deal with a laptop and a main library to speed things up with easy but sophisticated and controlable features that are not broken when mobile me is broken.

There it is that is my list, anythiing surprising to all of you folks out there? Anything that I missed that you guys thing absolutely must be in the next Aperture? If so let me know what you think. I swear if Apple goes and puts some dumb ass mobile me shit and faces in there or some asinine mapping crap that does me no good on a daily basis (and most other people that actually use this stuff more than the 5 minute in store demo) I will be done with the product, I swear I will. I will be done if there is just some freaking window dressing and no meat that helps me spend less time and produce better quality.

Over and out.

RB

First keyword hierarchies – both applications support creating and modifying hierarchies of keywords. For the uninitiated this is an awesomely powerful feature. You can put keywords like rose, petunia, chrysanthemum, etc, under the keyword “flower”, which you can then put under the keyword “plant”. By doing this if you tag an image with the keyword rose and only that keyword rose when you do a search for images with the keyword “plant” or “flower” that image that you tagged with “rose” will show up as well – get it? I cannot explain how useful this is, you really need to experience it yourself – for one thing it makes keywording your images about 3000 times faster and more effective. All you do is add really really specific keywords to your images and they inherent all the more general keywords above that specific keyword in the hierarchy. You don’t even have to bother thinking about it before you start keywording. Both applications allow you to manipulate and modify the keyword hierarchy anytime you want. Example – import a bunch of images of let’s say boats. add all the kinds of boats. Pearson, Hunter, O’Day, Hobie, whatever. When you are done if you don’t already have a general keyword boat just make one and maybe a sail keyword as well. Drag the sail under the boat keyword, then drag all of the specific kinds under sail – done now you can search on boat or sail and Lightroom/Aperture will find all of the boats you just tagged with the specific kind of boats – cool. That is where the similarity ends in terms of keyword hierarchies between Aperture and Lightroom. Aperture does all this wonderfulness withing Aperture itself but only embeds the specific keyword when you export images and choose to embed the metadata or create an XMP sidecar. You can do crazy stuff like running scripts that smash the entire hierarchy into each of your images based on the specific keywords but that sort of defeats the purpose. Lightroom on the other hand will export the entire hierarchy for each specific keyword, but wait there’s more, for each and every keyword Lightroom let’s you specify whether or not to include the parent keywords and…. whether to export it at all.

Comparing the ability to assign keywords both Aperture and Lightroom have similar features. You can pretty much type each keyword in and if it does not exist both applications keep track of that for you. You can select directly from a list that is searchable/filterable. Both applications allow you to copy assign keywords more than one at a time by using one image as the model and then applying those keywords to as many images as you want. Lightroom also allows you to assign a “shortcut” to a bunch of different and unrelated keywords, Aperture does not have this but personally I have found this useless.

Both applications allow you to import and export the whole keyword scheme, if you use more than one computer to do work this is absolutely essential. It also helps if you work with an agency that has standard keyword definitions or with a team of photographers. Aperture has the ability to lock the keywords in order to avoid unintentionally adding nonexistent keywords, Lightroom does not. This is really not a big deal given that the Lightroom interface promotes clicking buttons to add keywords vs. typing them. If you stick to consistency in your work-flow by clicking buttons when you intend on using an existing keyword and typing one when you intend on adding a new keyword you will be fine. Removing keywords is easy in both applications but the user interface to do this is better in Lightroom (that is Lightroom 1 – Aperture 98,767 on the UI front) I have no idea why Apple made this so bizarre in Aperture.

One last feature that Aperture does not have and Lightroom 2 introduced is keyword synonyms. This is the ability to associate a bunch of words with an “official keyword” that mean the same thing and are treated the same when searching. This is another amazing feature heck you can even put words in a different language here. Really good if you are a stock photographer and need to tag images with a million specifics that mean the same thing. Again you can tell Lightroom that the synonyms should be exported if you want – this is a huge deal – wake up Apple get your forkin’ act together and stop giving Aperture users ridiculous things like “All Project” view so we can have a screen that looks like iPhoto isn’t that nice – give us the keyword features that Lightroom has – SOON.

The only thing that I can say about Aperture here is that again it wins in the user interface department with a couple of minor exceptions. Aperture is just elegant and pretty all the way around. Lightroom – especially the dialog boxes to manage some of the keyword functionality are clunky, cumbersome, and downright Windows 3.1′ish.

Score a big win for Adobe Lightroom 2 versus Apple Aperture 2 when it comes to keyword functionality.

RB