I'm starting to use the Keyword Manager in Photos more, and I see I have many hundreds of keywords that shouldn't be there and somehow were entered in error or accidentally. Is there a way I can use that Keyword Manager to show me all photos that have that keyword? I have a lot of work ahead of me to find those photos and remove those erroneous keywords and replace them with the correct keyword.
iMac 24″
You can certainly use a Smart Album to find all the pictures with a specific keyword.
The "TrafalgarSquare" field here is a pulldown menu with a list of all keywords. Or you can type the first letter or two and get down the alphabetical list. You can see that I have 27 keywords like this. Unfortunately, I seem to also have the keyword "Trafalgar Square" (with a space,) so I set up a Smart Album with
to find those. Luckily, there's only one, and I can quickly change it.
Now there are no "Trafalgar Square" pictures, so I can go to keyword manager (⌘K) and with Edit I can find that and hit delete.
If there had been 20 of them, I might just add the right Keyword (so they have both) and go to Keyword manager and delete the space one-- it would say there are 20--are you sure?
If you don't use keyword shortcuts, quickpicks, and filters, be sure to try that-- it's a great time saver.
You can use keywords to make lots of things easier. For picking Favorites, see this:
Choosing Favorites using Keywords in Mac … - Apple Community
Keywords Smart Albums are among the most powerful tools in Photos.
You do not need to find the photos with the wrong keyword. You can delete a keyword summarily from all photos bay deleting the keyword right in the Keyword Manager. Then you will get a warning, that the keyword will be removed fro 100 photos, or similar.
Try this:
If the keyword is embedded in the metadata tags of the original, it may reappear, when the library is rebuild. In that case you have to remove it outside of Photos from the original image file, for example with exiftool and reimport the cleaned original. Or just ignore the additional keywords.
This is really helpful. I have hundreds of keywords that are in error, so it'll take me a while to make (temporary) Smart Albums for each of them, but this may be doable and is certainly a good way to find them
I think I'm realizing where all the error keywords have come from in my photos. Apparently when you save a photo from the web, it can often insert keywords that are somehow associated with the photo on the web and insert them as keywords into your photo that's now in your Apple photo library. That's surprising but it does seem to be happening as I have photos with keywords like 'Grassland', Hardcover book', 'Hat', 'Fashion', 'Holding', 'Full Length', etc. that I definitely did not add myself. It's these keywords that I want to delete (after seeing the photos that contain them).
rick7 wrote: … Apparently when you save a photo from the web, it can often insert keywords that are somehow associated with the photo on the web
I don't much download pictures from the web. All sorts of things can be embedded inside picture files. No telling what else you've imported. This is a bit like clicking on a link in an email from a random Prince in Nigeria who needs your help.
Friends' pictures may come with keywords, but those are often stripped with other private information. Legitimate websites usually strip metadata before making pictures downloadable. It's all privacy driven.
You can just go through the Keyword Manager and hit Delete on every one that seems useless to you. If you have only 1 or 2 of those, just delete them!
OK-- just as léonie said moments before me…
And she makes a great point-- the original picture file that's imported is never altered-- the keywords you delete are deleted from the database, not from the original picture. So they may come back to haunt you.
But you added a very good warning about pictures from the web and attachments, Richard. I have disabled the Safari > Preferences > General: "Open safe downloads automatically". I don't trust Safari to decide if a download is safe to open.
Fantastic, thank you. This is by far the easier way to do it.
You're welcome, Rick. Good Luck! 😊
Using Keyword Manager in Photos
