Of all the iLife applications , iPhoto is probably the one I practice the most — it superintend thousands of epitome for me , and I rely heavily on keywords to make it well-situated to quickly notice the pictures I require . Unfortunately , Apple ’s support for keywords is quite clunky , make them somewhat tough to use ( add keywords is done in one spot , assign in another , you ca n’t sort the lean , etc . ) . put down Ken Ferry ’s freeKeyword Assistant(KA ) , a great iPhoto chaw - in that makes working with keywords much simpler . ( I covered this handy tool in the May 2005 Working Mac column , and it was a macosxhints.comPick of the Weekif you ’d like a fleck more entropy about how it make for . )
Unfortunately , aliveness seems to have trespass on Ken ’s work on Keyword Assistant ; it has n’t been upgraded since March of 2006 . The want of a more - late update have two job . The first is that you ca n’t run Keyword Assistant on an Intel - power Mac ( unless you run for iPhoto in Rosetta ) . Unfortunately , the only solution for this trouble is to hope that Ken releases a Universal reading of his quid - in in the future .
The second problem , and one that we can do something about , is that Ken disables some of Keyword Assistant ’s feature if the iPhoto version is unexampled than what existed as of the late KA release . And that ’s where we ’re at now — iPhoto is currently at version 6.0.4 , but the modish adaptation of KA was only fully functional up through iPhoto 6.0.2 . As such , when you set up KA , you ’re greet by a dialog cue you that certain features , such as the ability to create young keywords through the KA interface , have been disable .
Given my heavy reliance on KA , I was thrilled whensomeone figured outhow to make it work with the former edition of iPhoto . What follow is a more - thoroughgoing rendering of the explanation cater in the above link . Proceed at your own risk , of row , and verify you ’ve got a good backup of all your photos — just in cause something goes awfully ill-timed , you would n’t want to miss all your images ! You might also require to make a reliever of iPhoto itself . Finally , the trace assumes KA is already installed and working , albeit in its special capacity .
check that iPhoto is n’t running , and then start the Applications folder in the Finder . controller - select the iPhoto program and choose Show Package Contents . When the Contents window open , navigate through the follow directories : NetServices - > Bundles - > KeywordAssistant . NetService - > Contents - > MacOS . Inside the MacOS folder , you ’ll find KeywordAssistant . This is the actual binary codification that makes the secure - in work . And we ’re travel to delete it … with a text editor , no less . spread your preferred saturated text editor program , such as TextEdit ( in patent text manner ) or my current fave , Smultron . Then drag and drop the KeywordAssitant single file onto your editor ’s Dock icon . ( If the Dock wo n’t highlight when you drop back over your editor ’s picture , adjudicate holding down Command and Option to force the picture to “ have ” the file . )
When the file opens , it ’s going to appear like gibberish — binary data from programs does n’t await all that useful in a text editor :
But find within the gibber there are snipping of decipherable school text ? We ’re going to search for just such a snippet now . tally Command - F ( or whatever your editor program apply for discovery ) . In the search dialog , enter WarnForiPhotoVersionsAbove as the hunt terminal figure , and compress Return to start the search . Your editor will jump forward to a division that take care like this :
The key portion of that line is the6.0.2 . If iPhoto has a version number higher than that , then KA will define its own capacity . Simply by changing that number to something higher , you’re able to restore KA ’s full functionality — at least as of iPhoto 6.0.4 . But what issue should you use ?
While anything heavy is ok , it seems that Apple has been passably good about only doing “ major ” acclivity of iPhoto ’s functionality in the annual iLife updates . That is , I would await that iPhoto 7 will be announed in January of 2007 , with all sort of raw lineament . Between now and then , we ’ll mostly see germ localisation , none of which will likely interfere with KA . So I chose to replace6.0.2with6.9.9 in my copy of KA . Barring any unforeseen changes from Apple , this should give me a fully functional KA until iPhoto 7 ships . clean whatever numbers you ’d like to apply , and then preserve your changes and shut the file .
After have the edits , open iPhoto , and you should find that you once again have a to the full - functional Keyword Assistant . Hopefully we ’ll get a new Universal double star from Ken in the near future , making this modification unneeded . But until that happens , I ’m very happy to have Keyword Assistant back in activeness !