I have a new version which traps some syncing bugs more effectively for those who can use it, which I will upload later today.

The first thing I discovered was that I couldn’t see any way to add tags – or rather, keywords, as iPhoto calls them – en masse, which seemed very odd. (It may have a mechanism which I didn’t find.) But that’s what we have Applescript for isn’t it?

Edit: after writing this post I was informed that Cmd-K brings up a list of tags in iPhoto, which can be used to mass tag photos. However, I shall keep this blog post here because (a) the Launchbar integration means it can easily be done via the keyboard and (b) the script itself might be useful for people as a starting point for keyword manipulation in iPhoto.

So I started writing a script to do this. The second thing that I noticed was that, in some cases, keywords just were not being added to pictures, and I found that iPhoto silently refuses to add keywords via Applescript which don’t actually exist in its list of keywords. A bit annoying, but surely, easy to overcome – after all, we can get a list of all keywords in iPhoto, so just check that first, and if the keyword doesn’t exist, add it before trying to tag the photos. Surely.

The third thing that I learnt this morning was that it seems to be entirely impossible to add new keywords to iPhoto via Applescript. You just can’t do it – you can’t make a new keyword at all, it kicks up errors when you try, including the ever helpful “AppleEvent failed”.

So the result is a script which does mass add keywords, but only keywords which already exist. It warns you if they don’t rather than just failing; you’ll have to add them to one photo manually first. But I have now replaced my manual folders with smart folders and events, and my sidebar looks a lot tidier. I also now find it a lot quicker to tag photos using the keyboard only, via Launchbar.

Here’s the script to download:

• Applescript: iPhoto mass add keywords

Download from the dedicated page as usual.

Edit: Please can you post (a) the version of OS X you are using and (b) the version of Yojimbo you are using, when reporting a bug? I have a feeling that there may be some subtle Applescript differences involved here, and even if there aren’t, I’d like to eliminate that possibility.

From p76 of the Applescript Language Guide:

Stay-open script applications can perform periodic actions, even in the background, as long as the script application is running.

What I need therefore is an idle handler.

If a stay-open script application includes an idle handler, AppleScript sends the script application periodic idle commands—by default, every 30 seconds—allowing it to perform background tasks when it is not performing other actions.

So, I will put one of those in and it will run the sync periodically and everything will be happy. That should be straightforward.

• Version checking at startup, with the option to download now or later, or skip a version.
• Logging information to ~/Library/Logs/Simplenote Yojimbo Sync.log, which is the primary purpose of this version, to get some more debugging information for the people for whom it doesn’t seem to work. If you are one of these people, please leave a comment or get in touch with me on the Yojimbo or Simplenote API lists.
• A couple of little coding improvements which probably aren’t very interesting to most people, but which you can see if you’d like to open the bundle and peer at the scripts.

Planned future improvements

• It’s been suggested that the app have an option to sync with the simpletext.ws website used by Writeroom as well as or instead of Simplenote. I think this is a good idea, as there is an API and also I do own a copy of Writeroom for the iPhone, and it shouldn’t be very hard to just change the method of finding notes, but I’ll make sure the basic sync structure works for everyone first.
• I find it a bit counter-intuitive that deleting a note on one platform doesn’t delete it on the other one and in fact re-syncs it next time unless you delete it on both. However, again, until I’m sure the basic sync structure works for everyone, I’m going to keep it like that, because it minimises the chance of data loss. Once that’s sorted out, I plan to fix it so that deleting a note deletes it on both.
• There needs to be an automatic sync option. At the moment you could use something like Lingon to run it, but that isn’t a very user-friendly method. Unfortunately, adding this feature is complicated by the fact that I have no idea how to do it. I’m sure it can’t be that hard.

If you would care to try it out, I would be delighted – please leave any comments, bug reports etc on this post. (Even just “works as expected” would be appreciated.)

Documentation and download

• (see main project page)