If you are using {Aperture} and are going through a large collection of older images it’s very nice being able to add IPTC Copyright entries during import. The auto-complete is very handy too, as most of mine have been in a few distinct locations and the saving on typing is very easy to get used to, but I found a problem when I came from adding a load of images from 2005 into 2006: the auto-complete works on an ASCII ascending match rather than most recently used, so by default my Copyright was coming out as ‘Ian Spray, 2005’ which was annoying to correct.

The answer may lie in the menus, but you can also open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Aperture.plist with the Property List Editor program (it’s a binary plist – convert to and from ASCII and stay on the command line if you wish) it’s trivial to look for the node called iptcProperties.CopyrightNotice.Completions and expand it to show all the values that Aperture uses. Note that simply changing the order (in my case so the index to ‘Ian Spray, 2006’ comes before ‘Ian Spray, 2005’) does not change the lookup behaviour of {Aperture}, but deleting the 2005 entry sorted things out completely.

(Update: Doh ! Old news: http://www.tow.com/2005/12/16/aperture-and-iview-auto-complete/ but in this case it was faster to find the file myself than {Google} for a solution)