Captions in Aperture

Here is a small AppleScript that provides a marginally friendlier interface for entering captions in Aperture than the built in method.

It presents a small dialogue box for each selected photo and allows you to enter a caption. Pressing RETURN or clicking “Ok” saves the caption and takes you to the next selected photo. Pressing ESC or clicking “Skip” leaves the current caption as it is, and moves to the next photo. You can click “Cancel” to stop the script.

I use it by adding a trigger to QuickSilver that binds a hot key (I picked Control-Apple-C, which remarkably seems to be unused by Aperture–it already binds most conceivable key combinations, and even a few no-one has thought of yet) to the script, which can be saved anywhere you like. QS can limit the scope of the binding to a single app, which helps prevent conflicts in other applications.

I’m no AppleScript expert, so I’d be happy to receive any feedback on better techniques. It doesn’t seem like it’s possible in script, but it would also be cool to be able to display a thumbnail in the dialog–just having the name is not necessarily all that helpful.

The source of the script is available in my subversion repository.