If you’ve added keywords to your images, it can be very handy to have Aperture display those keywords as labels on the bottom of each photo in the Viewer. This way, instead of having to open the Metadata Inspector, you can see at a glance which keywords have been applied to each image.
- Choose Preferences from the Aperture menu and click the Metadata icon at the top of the window.
- Click the Viewer checkbox (if it’s not already checked) and click the Set 2 radio button, which activates the “Viewer - Expanded” metadata view. In the Viewer, the metadata overlay appears below each photo.
- You can also change the setting of the Placement pop-up menu to control how this data is positioned at the bottom of each photo. Choose the placement you prefer.
- The “Viewer - Expanded” metadata set includes basic camera settings and file information as well as the photo caption and keywords. If you’d like to simplify the overlay so that only caption and keywords are shown, change the Set 2 pop-up menu to Caption & Keywords. Now you’ll see only captions and keywords as an overlay on each image in the Viewer — and you can hide and show the overlays at any time by pressing the Y key.
When it comes to these metadata overlays, you’re not limited to the specific combinations of metadata defined in the preset metadata views pop-up menu. You can use the Metadata Inspector to set up custom metadata views that show exactly the data you want. The setup instructions are on page 281 in the Aperture User Manual.