A better system for keywords in the People category to distinguish different people with the same name.

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If you have a catalog with family photos spanning generations there is a real risk of you having more than one person with the same name. And unless one creates an endless amount of Parent > Child hierarchies the risk of ending up with two or more people inside the same Child drawer of the hierarchy with the same name is high. So far the only way I have found as a workaround is to give them numbers. For example John Smith #1 and John Smith #2.

My suggestion is that when you place a keyword in the People category it is assigned a unique ID number, which allows you to create more than one identical People keyword inside the same hierarchy drawer as they will have different ID numbers. You’d also need a couple of more fields in the system to associate to the names, like the synonyms field already there. Maybe a small text field where one could write things like “Born 1949”?

dj_paige

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If you really want this to be a feature request, please read and follow these instructions:

As far as your keyword concern, how about creating a keyword like this:

John Smith (born 1949)

or

John Smith (high school classmate)

You state: “ My suggestion is that when you place a keyword in the People category it is assigned a unique ID number, which allows you to create more than one identical People keyword inside the same hierarchy drawer as they will have different ID numbers.”

I fail to understand the point of unique IDs. Humans using these keywords generally are not going to know that keyword John Smith 4 (that’s the unique ID number) is really the John Smith from your high school class. How would anyone (even the person who created the keywords) remember which unique id is which John Smith?

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Torbjørn Rasch PettersenAuthor

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English isn’t my first language, so excuse the confusing and only half sensible request text.

I found out that Lightroom Classic do assign unique id’s to keywords. It uses localIdentifier which seems to be a 7 digit number. So when I said I would like a unique ID number there seems to be one already. Which means I have to rethink my request. The thing is that this ID number would not be shown with the name without a boxed ticked for it to show. It’s not supposed to be part of the name itself.

Identifiers like this would firstly be useful, and understood, by the one creating them. It is of zero importance if you know who John Smith 1 and 2 are or not. Even with more information you wouldn’t know if John Smith 1 is It is however of importance for me to know that if I export photos of John Smith to use in a genealogy program it is the right John Smith.

I absolutely think it would be useful to have the people keywords be more advanced. One just had to sit down and figure out the best way to do it. There are IPTC fields Adobe could use and link to or copy. Like “Person Shown in the Image, with Details” and the associated fields. There are also the IPTC Image Regions which could be tied into it. All in all there are much improvements that could be done to keywords in the People category.

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dj_paige

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In my opinion, the whole idea of using a numerical code to distinguish between two John Smiths, or 3 Mary Jones, or whatever, is antithetical to the purpose of metadata. Good use of Metadata frees you from the problem of memorizing auxiliary information. You don’t have to memorize file names or folder names, you don’t have to know the date the photo was taken, you don’t have to know who John Smith 1 and John Smith 2 are; you can find the photo by the content of the photo. You can create keywords where no memorizing is needed of who John Smith 1 and John Smith 2 are. As I stated above

John Smith (highschool classmate)
John Smith (Mary father-in-law)

are perfectly valid keywords and this doesn’t require you to know which number John Smith you want in a given situation.

I have a similar situation, but with the names of places. There is a town in New York called Findley Lake, and there is also a lake by the exact same name. How do I keep them separate? I stole an idea from Wikipedia and I have two keywords

Findley Lake (town)
Findley Lake (lake)

and there is never any confusion about what the keyword is referring to, and I don’t have to remember which is Findley Lake 1 and which is Findley Lake 2 (which I know I would have trouble doing).

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