P: Ability to sync Lightroom Classic keywords with the Lightroom Ecosystem

After 5 years of using largely Lightroom Classic I am once again trying to use Lightroom CC as well.  What prevents me from using Lightroom CC is the complete lack or organizational tools in Lightroom CC.  Photographers generate pictures in the thousands.  Being able to find, display, or edit photos in your software tool is a nessesity.  Every time I try to use Lightroom CC I find that the excellent organization tools present in Lightroom Classic have been stripped out.  No transfer of keywords or location data.  No Metadata pre-sets.  Nothing.  If I want to add data that will let me use smart collectiosn it has to be done manually.  With thousands of photos that is an overwhelming task.  So, I guess I am back to Lightroom Classic and limited to sharing my work solely on the computer that Lightroom Classic is located on.  I know that I have given this feedback through several avenues, such as this note or completing Adobe's requests for user feedback that I occasionally get.  I know that there are many others giving the same feedback to Adobe.  When will Adobe listen?

Please just sync keywords to cloud. It does not matter if you have to flatten the hierarchy, as long as the keywords are synched. Most people I know don't even use the hierarchy function of keywords anyway. It's just a convenient way of finding images fast when a potential customer asks. 

It has costs me several clients not to be able to search for images when promted. One has about 5-10 seconds before the potential client has gotten bored of waiting for me to search for an image. Keywords are essential for being able to show images when you are "out on the field" networking. And without that feature, my income actually can be cut in half, just by that feature missing.

It seems you are very focused on images (which is good), but not on the business arround it. To be able to live in the shrinking pond that this business is, and to possibly exand it, the business part is 90% of everything. Please help photographers to actually find images, thereby increasing their income, when actually meeting with potential clients IRL. For us, LrC is the main application. We would never fine tune images' colors and light on a tablet in ever changing light conditions. Please see it from our side for a moment.

Please allow for Lightroom cloud to actively sync keywords from Classic with permission to disregard any nested status.  Keyword sync between Lightroom Classic and Lightroom cloud is critical and has never been addressed by Adobe.  The main reason I hear for this is that keywords in Lightroom Classic are nested and keywords in Lightroom cloud are flat with no hierarchy structure.  For real world users, this is a non-issue.  I am a heavy keyworder, but I would be happy to use Lightroom mobile and filter for any flat keyword to find my images quickly and efficiently way from my desktop.  If I am looking for a photo from Rome, I don't need to keyword search for Rome and Italy and Europe and travel.  Having access to the flat keyword alone is perfectly effective.  Nested keywords are helpful for CREATING the keywords initially, but they do very little to serve in SEARCH functionality.  Not having the ability to search my imagebase by keyword remotely due to this shortcoming means I cannot rely on Adobe alone as my sole photo editor.  I need to also rely on Apple Photos or Google Photos or some other program which does allow the import of keyword metadata.  If I am searching for a specific photo at a coffee shop that requires the nuance of a keyword tag (versus location data etc), Adobe's integration between Classic and Cloud is ineffective.  Removing the requirement to have nested keywords seems like an easy fix, either by default or by user permission.  

There are two other ways it could be implemented which would be less complicated:

Implement hierarchial keywords in Lightroom Cloud. Lightroom Cloud has already all the complex professional editing features of Lightroom Classic, so there's no reason it couldn't have a complex organizing feature.

Implement a new tag feature in Lightroom Classic. Tags would be like keywords but flat and would sync with Lightroom Cloud Keywords. It would exist in a new distinct section in the library panel. It wouldn't replace Lightroom Classic keywords, it would just add a new organizing feature to Classic. It would basically be Lightroom Cloud keywords in Classic, in a different section.

Both these solutions would add new feature to either Lightroom Classic or Lightroom Cloud, which is great. 

I think the first solution would make the most sense though. I don't understand why Adobe ported all complex editing features of Classic to Cloud but not the organizing ones. If Lightroom Cloud had all organizing features of Lightroom Classic then there could be only one Lightroom, available and syncing on all devices.

Would be better for everybody.

I'm a bit surprised that a developer hasn't found a way to get keyword syncing implemented. There is apparenly a market.

I'm sure Adobe felt this is way too complicated and error prone. It's often not that something is impossible, it's more that it can't be done in a way that does not create more problems than it solves. Another thing is that Adobe said when Lightroom was released, that Lightroom Classic would not get any new sync capabilities. They kept their promise so far, and I do not see any signs that this is about to change. You can continue this discussion till the next century, but I am convinced you still won't have keyword sync by then. That's all I have to add.

@JohanElzenga Said, "I think Adobe has decided not to do this, because no matter how you try to implement it, it won't work with hierarchical keywords on one end (Lightroom Classic) and flat keywords (Lightroom) on the other end. Using hierarchical keywords means you can have the same keyword in different hierarchies. Flat keywords means you cannot have two identical keywords, so synching these will create problems one way or another. Yes, this has been requested for many years, but the problem remains the same after all those years. This has nothing to do with being unwilling to give long-term, loyal, paying subscribers what they asked for"

I agree that Adobe has decided not to do this, but I don't think it is correct that it can't be done.  I've posted variations of one idea on how to do this several times, but here it is again for new readers......

PROPOSED WAY TO SYNC KEYWORDS BETWEEN LR/CLASSIC AND LR/CLOUD

Even keeping the constraint that LR Classic uses hierarchical KW's and LR Cloud uses a linear (flat) KW structure, this problem can be solved.  There are, of course, some technical aspects but the main rationale I've heard so far for not doing this is the logical problem of how to map a hierarchical structure to a linear structure.  One solution is to convert LR Cloud to a hierarchical structure but putting that aside, here is one possible solution to that problem:

1)  In LR Classic, Adobe can add check boxes in the create/edit keyword dialog for

• "Sync this KW with LR Cloud"
• "Sync Containing KW's with LR Cloud"
• "Sync Synonyms with LR Cloud (would become regular KW's in LR Cloud)”

2)  . In LR Classic, whenever you mark a Keyword to Sync (as suggested above), it checks to assure that another keyword with the same name but under a different parent – or no parent - is not also marked to Sync.  If it finds one it would deny the request with a message.  For example if I am trying to sync KW “Red” under KW “Flowers” and it finds that I already synced KW “Red” under “Cars” the request would be rejected.  In our example, if one wanted both occurrences of "red" to sync, the user would need to rename one or both of them (e.g.  Red-Flower and Red-Car).

3)  In addition, Parent keywords in LR/Classic can also sync into the flat LR/Cloud structure where using “Sync Containing Keywords” option uses the same logic that is used today with export.  Of course those synced parent keywords would no longer be parents in LR/.Cloud but would also be in the flat structure.

4)  If an image in LR Classic loses a keyword or these tick's get changed, the changes on effected images can sync to LR Cloud.  This may include adding or removing KW’s in LR Cloud or attaching/detaching keywords from images in LR Cloud

5)  If a user defined KW is added to an image in LR Cloud it could map to either no KW in LR Classic or at most one "ticked" KW in LR Classic.  In the former case, LR Classic would create the new KW at the root level of the Hierarchy with "Sync this KW with LR Cloud" ticked.  In the later case there could be only 1 ticked LR Classic Keyword (or synonym) with that name that would be affected.

Of course there are plenty of corner cases and details that would need to be addressed, but I worked for Adobe for several years and have a very high regard for the quality of the engineers there to solve this problem if management would just ask them to do it.

THIS CAN BE DONE if there is a will to do so and the more people who "vote" for having KW's sync between the ecosystems, the more it will push Adobe to re-consider this.   

.    

Duplication is not a problem. Its plain text. De-duplicate at runtime. 

I think Adobe has decided not to do this, because no matter how you try to implement it, it won't work with hierarchical keywords on one end (Lightroom Classic) and flat keywords (Lightroom) on the other end. Using hierarchical keywords means you can have the same keyword in different hierarchies. Flat keywords means you cannot have two identical keywords, so synching these will create problems one way or another. Yes, this has been requested for many years, but the problem remains the same after all those years. This has nothing to do with being unwilling to give long-term, loyal, paying subscribers what they asked for.

This feature was requested almost 7 years ago and this thread has remained active for much of that time.. 

I can't believe Adobe still hasn't incorporated this fundamental feature.. 

Adobe is currently syncing ai masks but can't sync text-based keywords...? Give me a break lol..

Rikk Flohr, you're still in the LR orbit at Adobe please reconsider this important feature request for your long-term, loyal, paying subscribers..