The first thing you need to know is that iPhoto Keyword Assistant has been updated, and the new 1.9 release supports iPhoto 6 (but not on Intel-powered machines).

I’ve been looking forward to this, because it means I can finally put some effort into tagging my huge photo keywords backlog.

Thanks to iPhoto 6’s improved performance, I’m much more willing to invest time in my digital photography collection. While I like the idea of tagging data generally, I’ve not used iPhoto’s keywords feature to date, simply because the interface for doing so was so difficult and time-consuming to use.

With Ken Ferry’s Keyword Assistant in place and working in iPhoto, I can confidently start adding tags to all my pictures. But even then, iPhoto’s kludgy keywords UI doesn’t let me quickly and easily see which photos I’ve tagged and which ones still need to be tagged.

Now, in an ideal world I’d like someone to create something I’ve nicknamed “Tagnag“, which would periodically nag me to provide tags for a handful of images.

But in the absence of that, a quick Smart Album, combined with Keyword Assistant, should be enough to create something that’s almost as useful.

Just to keep things manageable, I’m starting with all the 2005 photos for now. I’ll tag the rest later. So my Smart Album has just two attributes: Date is “Between 1st January and 31st December 2005″; and Keyword is “None”. The result displays all my untagged pictures in that time span.

Now I can zip through this Smart Album with Keyword Assistant enabled. Each photo I tag instantly disappears from the Smart Album. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be able to dip into it whenever I have a spare five minutes, tagging up as many pictures as I have time for. Eventually the Smart Album will be empty and I can move on to tagging everything from 2004, and so on. I’m hoping that using this simple system, I can get my entire photo collection tagged within a month or two.