To our customers

A lot of people have been emailing us asking when Keyword Manager will be compatible with iPhoto 9. Today we can give you the answer that unfortunately it will not, as we have decided to discontinue Keyword Manager. This is not a decision we've made lightly and we're sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

Some of you may remember that we posted a beta version of Keyword Manager 1.6 earlier this year, which was compatible with iPhoto 9.1.1. However, when version 9.1.2 was released, the beta version no longer functioned. This is because a number of the functions that Keyword Manager uses to do its work were removed from iPhoto in that update.

Each version of iPhoto that is released requires us to rewrite the entire interface between Keyword Manager and iPhoto, due to the changes that Apple makes to the internal structure of the program. We'd like to stress that this is not unexpected nor in any way Apple's fault. It is just the nature of writing a plug-in for a program without a supported plug-in architecture.

The economics of keeping Keyword Manager up to date has caught up with us and making the plug-in work reliably in the current version of iPhoto, and then the next one after that, would require a substantial investment in time and resources from our side, and even then it is not certain that we would get Keyword Manager working as well as we'd like.

All the keywords you've assigned to photos in iPhoto will remain even when you do not have Keyword Manager installed, since they use the iPhoto's own keyword system. Anyone who would like to export the hierarchical keyword list can use this tool to convert it to a format readable by Aperture and Lightroom.

If any developer is interested in continue the work, please drop us an email and we'll see were we can take it from there.

Sincerely,

The Bullstorm Team