for Mac you need OS X 10.5 or later; for PC you need XP, Vista or Windows 7. For the importing of images you will need to have Quick Time Player, which you can download for free. 

 Certainly.

No, Keyword Perfect resides on your computer and is totally functional when you are not connected to the internet.

You can have the program on more than one machine; on your desktop and your laptop for example. Be aware that the programs can not communicate with each other so any changes you make in the vocabulary of one program will not be picked up by the other program. 

 The price is the price. There are no yearly fees. For the onetime price you get technical support and access to any upgrades for as long as you use the program.

Because Keyword Perfect is downloaded from the internet, it may take awhile for your computer to open the program, and depending on the security settings of your computer, you may be asked to enter your password before it will open.  Be patient, it may take a minute to begin, but every time after that it will take only a few seconds.

After creating the keywords in Keyword Perfect, you export them to the IPTC fields of your JPEG or Raw file.  When you open those files in Lightroom the keywords will appear in the keyword box. 

Also Keyword Perfect is set up to make submitting to Alamy easy, using either the Alamy submission page with the keywords broken down into the Essential, Main and Comprehensive Keywords, or through creating an Alamy-formatted excel sheet

To get an idea about workflow with Lightroom or any other image management software and Keyword Perfect please watch Tutorial # 1 Importing Images.

One workflow method is to open the RAW files from your camera in your image management software and put the ones you want to keep in their own folder.  You can then import the RAW files into Keyword Perfect, keyword them and save the keywords in the IPTC fields of the Raw images' sidecar files.  Every time you generate a JPG or TIF from a RAW file the keywords will transfer to the new image. 

Another workflow method is to generate JPGs, and import them into Keyword Perfect before you submit them to a stock house or put them up on your website.  In your image management software you can synchronize your keyworded JPGs with their RAW or TIF versions so that the keywords reside in all three.  Check with your image management software for details on how that process works.

First import your RAW images into Keyword Perfect, keyword them and save the keywords into the XMP side car files of the Raw images.  Then convert your RAW images into DNG files (using Adobe Raw Converter for instance) and the keywords will be embedded in them.  The final step is to delete the RAW Files and their loathsome XMP sidecar files.

Open up Keyword Perfect, go to the help menu item at the top of the desktop and choose Update Keyword Perfect. You will be notified if you have the latest version of Keyword Perfect. If you are told that your program is out of date follow the prompts on the screen and Keyword Perfect will backup your data and then take you to the website where you can download and install the latest version. 

 No.

Yes, for now it is only in English. If there is enough interest for more languages we will add them in the future. 

No, Keyword Perfect is not designed to crash when you import a DNG raw file. If you import a DNG file converted by Lightroom 4.1, then, unfortunately, Keyword Perfect does crash. But, if you use DNGs created with Adobe DNG Converter version 6.1 or later then everything works fine. Why do two Adobe products create such divergent results? Good question. 

Generators are terms, such as "boy," "cat," or "smiling" which you choose from the drop down list in the Entry screen to describe items, actions or concepts in your image.  Attached to these generators are associated keywords which are words that are compiled into a list and inserted into the IPTC Keyword field of your image.  For example, when you choose the generator "smiling" the following associated keywords are linked to your image; "smiling, smile, grin, happiness, happy, joy, enjoy, glad, enjoyment, facial expression, smiles, grins, facial expressions."  The essential strength of generators is as time savers, for by choosing one word you generate thirteen keywords.

Of course. You can customize the vocabulary to match your keywording style, by changing, deleting or adding both generators and associated keywords. Look at vocabulary tutorials #15 and #16 to learn more.  

We have a few suggestions for getting keywords into the IPTC keyword field of your TIFF images. Because we can not write to TIFFs we instead create XMP files that contain the keywords for TIFF files, because we know that Aperture will automatically embed the info from xmp files into tiffs when you import them.  We are not sure whether Bridge Lightroom, Photoshop or Photo Mechanic have the same functionality. Another solution is to create JPEGS from your TIFFs and import the JPEGS into Keyword Perfect and keyword them. When you are done you go into your image management software and "update" or "synchronize" your keywords. As long as the TIFF and JPEG share the same name (ie 12345.jpg and 12345.tif) this process will bring the keywords from the JPEG over to the TIFFs. "Synchronizing" the keywords works differently with each image management system, so you will have to investigate how it is done with your software A more time consuming solution is, after keywording your images, to copy the keywords from the IPTC keywords field in Keyword Perfect and paste them into the keywords field of your image management software.  

 It depends on the photograph. If it is a conceptual image with lots of items and ideas it could take up 3-5 minutes. If, on the other hand, it is a studio shot of an object it could take as little as 30 seconds. The time-saving qualities of Keyword Perfect are revealed when you copy the keywords of one photograph to many others. So where it might take you two minutes to keyword one image, it takes only 10 minutes to copy the keywords of that image to 100 similar images.

 First you would import the images and give them a batch name. "100 US Flags" for example. Then you would keyword the first image, choosing the generators "outdoor," "partly cloudy," "one," "close up (objects)," "low angle view," "nobody," "US flag," "flag pole" and "windy." Be aware that it is unnecessary to add such conceptual terms as "patriotism" or "patriotic image" because those keywords are already associated with the generator "US flag." Once you have chosen the keywords for the first image, click on the Cloner tab, and then click on "select all" button. It will take Keyword Perfect about 30 seconds to copy all the generators to the 99 other US flag pictures and show them all in the Cloner screen. Here you can go through each image and change the generators that are not applicable to that photograph. For example you may change "partly cloudy" to "blue sky" in one image, then in the next take out "windy," and in the next change "low angle view" to "high angle view." In this way, depending on how many changes you need to make it could take you between 10 and 20 minutes to keyword the 100 images. Of course you will want to watch tutorial #8 Cloning to learn how to do this.

When you submit to Alamy you have two choices.  You can go onto their submission web site and fill in all the fields, or you can send them an excel spread sheet. Keyword Perfect accommodates the two submission methods with the two layouts. Watch the tutorials #14 Alamy Compliant Keywording and #18 Alamy Excel Export for a detailed explanation of how the two different methods works.  

The essential keywords that go at the front of your keyword list can be limited by either words, phrases or characters. You determine which you want to use in the Keyword tab of Preferences. It is designed for Getty, but can be used for other stock houses that may also want the most important keywords at the front of the keyword list. 

The File Menu item Import Images only appears in the Entry screen.  To put it another way, you can only import images in the Entry Screen.

Set the separator character in Keyword tab of Preferences, (Watch tutorial #1 and #2 Preferences for the details), then keyword the images you want to submit to one stock house.  When you are done, remove or archive those images, change the separator character in Preferences, import new images and keyword them for submission to the other stock house.

Buy a copy of Keyword Perfect for each of your pseudonyms so they don't get jealous of each other. And to make sure they don't fight install each copy on a different computer. 

Yes, you can import images from any number of folders.  After you have imported images from one folder, choose the File Menu item Import Images and choose another folder.  Repeat until you have all the images you want in the batch. Remember you can not mix Raw file images with JPEGs or TIFFs in a single batch, and that a batch can only have one name. For more information watch tutorial #1 Importing Images.

Yes, as long as that disk is formatted for your machine. If it is formatted for a PC and you are on a Mac it will not work and.... if it is formatted for a Mac f you are on PC it will not work.

 There are a number of reasons why the import won't work:

1) Your version of Quick Time Player is old and needs to be updated to the latest version. Keyword Perfect is dependent on Quick Time Player to make thumbnails of your images and bring them into the program. If Quick Time Player is not function properly or is out of date then problems can occur.

 

2) On Mac machines, the name of the folder containing the images has a forward slash (/) as in "Sports/Baseball." The import can not work if you have a forward slash in the name. To fix this problem take the forward slash out of the name. Macs use the forward slash to distinguish between folders. If you have a forward slash in a folder name you are just confusing the poor computer.

 

3) The images are corrupt. Generating JPEGs or TIFFs from Raw file sometimes corrupts the image itself or the IPTC data contained within the image. The corruption of the data is slight and may not be detectable in other programs such as Preview or Photoshop. But it may not be too insignificant to trip up Quick Time Player when it tries to import the image into Keyword Perfect. To fix the problem, delete the JPEGs or TIFFs and then generate new ones from the original Raw files. Retry the import.

 

4) The image is too large. The problem with importing large images is hard to pin down and varies from machine to machine. We have successfully imported JPEGs and TIFFs that are over 31 MB along with extremely large Raw files. We are constantly testing out Keyword Perfect by importing different images and have yet to discover a definitive size limitation. That is every image that a customer has sent us has been successfully imported on one of the office machines. The import seems to fail more with images that have excessively large formats (3000x50000 pixels) than just excessively large file sizes. To fix the problem. Try not to make your images too large .

Yes. All you have to do is keyword an image and then click on the Cloner tab to copy those keywords to images that you select from a list. Watch the #8 Cloner tutorial for more information. 

Yes. All you have to do is click on the Archive tab, find the image whose keywords you want to copy, click on the Image menu item Keyword Archive Cloner, and then select from the list the images you want to copy those keywords to. Watch the #17 Archive and #8 Cloner tutorials for more information. 

The weighted sort, located in the Keyword tab of Preferences, allows you to determine which types of keywords will appear in your keyword list.  This is important if your search engine puts more value on keywords at the top of your list of keywords.  Used in connection with essential keywords, Keyword Perfect allows you to arrange the first 20-30  keywords exactly as you want them.Watch tutorials #3 Preferences part 2 to learn how to set up the weighted sort.  Watch tutorial # 13 Getty Compliant Keywording to see how it works.

 Humility.