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

I understand one of the main reasons for this is that Adobe changed to a flat keyword hierarchy in Lightroom CC while Lightroom Classic has nested keywords (you know like Europe -> Iceland -> Reykjavik -> opera house). Lightroom CC cannot do any of that and likely will never gain this capability as apparently it is too hard for the typical user to use. Most of my keywords are hierarchical and I can't see a flat hierarchy working well for me.

It is disappointing to learn that keyword syncing with Lightroom Mobile only works with the less feature-rich Lightroom CC and not with Lightroom Classic CC. I hope Adobe reconsiders and adds that functionality to Classic. It should've been added at introduction of Mobile. 

Leading questions! Though I have (strong) opinions on all this, I recommend reading Bampton's recent blog posts: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/blog/.  In my own opinion, Adobe has for several years pared back investment in desktop LR, putting in the bare minimum to maintain desktop LR's revenue stream.  I don't see that changing.

Hi John, do you think Classic will be obsolet in some time? And is Adobe is implementing all Classic Feature into LR Mobile aka LR CC ?

According to Victoria Bampton (Lightroom Queen), who is pretty well-plugged-in to Adobe, "no new sync functionality will be added to Classic (so keywords and collection hierarchy won’t sync)."

It's a real shame, I have thousands of tags done in LR Classic - if I can't use them in CC this is pretty worthless for me. Any comments from Adobe??

This thread is quite confusing.  Is there an Adobe document someplace that explains this in all its permutations? 

However, this may explain why some of my keyworded images from LR Classic show Keywords in LR/CC and some do not.  And, that explanation - according to this thread - is that some of my synced images have metadata written back to the image file and some don't - which is entirely possible.

I just took one of my CR2 RAW files which did not show any keywords in LR/CC and saved the metadata to an XMP file in LR Classic.  Indeed, the keywords did not appear in LR/CC desktop or LR Web.  However, an DNG image with saved metadata does show Keywords in both LR/CC Desktop and LR/CC Web but changes made to keywords in classic do not migrate to the cloud.

I think I need another computer to help me understand this logic which is quite inconsistent.  Given  Adobe's justification of no folders being "why should you care what folder something is in as long as you can find it:" - I'm surprised that they would give us a situation where you have to know the underlying file type in order to know how the system will work.  I'm hoping that is a bug and not a design feature. 

Yes, it is easier, but Engineers love a challenge. But could be they were stopped by Marketing or Finance.
I am using Photo Mechanics for some years, because PM does not have a catalog. In LR Classic you can create a Smart Collection to find all picture with changed metadata by third party apps and then you can read all these updated meta data. This is useful if you do all your tagging in PM and want to have this info synced to LR mobile. Currently I am using Mylio for that, but my hope was to have all in LR. I am not giving up hope.

"No Engineer is implementing caption sync and not keyword sync."

Don't bet on it, Peter.

If you consider it, caption sync is easier for the engineer - it's just reading/writing a photo's text entry. Each keyword is a separate entity, so syncing would need to loop through the keyword structure looking for matching items (note hierarchy is an issue) and then apply those keywords to the photo. So more difficult, but not rocket science - if the will is there.

PhotoMechanic, like Bridge, just uses xmp to store tags and other metadata, and LR simply reads that.

@Peter Chater, how do you get your tags from Photo Mechanics into the LR catalog?