Adding captions in Aperture
I’ve just started using Apple’s Aperture to manage my photos (family and other), and I’m pretty pleased with it so far. One thing, however, that is harder than it needs to be is entering captions. As far as I can tell, the only way to do this in Aperture is to click on the photo in the browser, mouse over to the Information panel and click in the caption field (making sure you’ve selected IPTC fields to be displayed), type the caption and mouse back and click in the browser window so it has focus (otherwise any further keys you press will still be typing in the caption field). Then click on the next photo. Eeew.
This is bearable for one or two photos, but when you have a largish batch to do, it is very tedious. It’s also prone to error, such as when you start typing the caption without the field having focus, and Aperture gleefully trying to act on all your keypresses.
So I threw together a small AppleScript that provides a marginally friendlier interface. This is one of my first attempts at AppleScript, so I’d be happy to receive any feedback on better techniques.