Tagging photos in Finder

[DCBass]

Hello Everyone,

Hopefully you guys will be able to help me out. Here's the problem:

In iPhoto, you can 'tag' photos with keywords. However, these are not indexed to the photo themselves, not even Spotlight can search for these keywords.

This annoys me since I don't put everything in iPhoto.

So, I'd like to find a way to do this in Finder. It's easy enough to do one at a time, but in order to do this for a batch of photos, i suspect i need to use automator, which i'm not good at. I created a simple one, but i don't know how to have it ask me for the tag i want to give it. As far as I can tell, I can only create a workflow for a specific tag, meaning a new workflow for each unique tag. Is there a way for it to query me every time instead?

Also, I noticed that any Spotlight comments I put in cannot be viewed by Windows. Is there another field I can use so the tags can be viewed by both Spotlight and Windows?

Thanks in advance for all of the help.

-DCBass

 

[mkrishnan]

With respect strictly to the question of adding Spotlight tags, you might try this program called Meta which enhances your ability to tag multiple files and does other spotlight enhancements:

http://www.bigrobotsoftware.com/software.html

I haven't used it personally, but it looks promising.

With respect to tags that can be read cross-platform, the other option is probably to try and get an EXIF manipulation tool and see if you can bury the keywords in EXIF? EDIT: Actually, GraphicConverter might be the perfect app for this.

 

[DCBass]

mkrishnan,

thanks for the help. Graphic Coverter is working great for easily adding (and browsing!) all of my images in Finder. If only it was as slick-looking as iPhoto or Picasa .

However, I still have the problem with these keywords being recognized by Windows. Finally, I had my wife try to add a keyword to a picture and send it to my mac, only to discover that I cannot read her keywords either! I thought this sort of thing was standardized.

It's no big deal that Windows can't read them, but I thought it might be useful down the road.

On another note, I noticed in another thread that you went to UM. I graduated there in '03 in Music and Economics. What about yourself?

Thanks again,

DCBass