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

Forget about it, it’s a political decision, not technical. And unless they have a very good reason to do it, it won’t happen.

Highly unlikely I'm afraid. 

Is there any hope for keyword sync ever being implemented?

Just for clarity's sake, keyword syncing between Classic and the cloud has never been available. 

I'll merge this thread into the existing feature request, you may want to go vote on that thread.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE bring back keyword syncing between Lightroom Classic and Lightroom.

I use Lightroom Mobile and Classic. I would love to be able to save time by keyword tagging photos in Mobile. To do that effectively I would like to have access to my Classic keyword list within Mobile. Also, since Adobe Stock has a 50 keyword limit, with the first 10 keywords having greater importance, it would be nice to be able to organize my keywords in both Mobile and Classic to accommodate that limit.

@lumigraphics I do agree with you (and @11600604_hlmn) it's just them not doing it, but I do suspect that the keywords in online and CC aren't done the same as with CC or other apps that use whatever the keywording standard is.

I'd guess that the keywords are stored separately from the images as part of the image library in some other format that's possibly more appropriate for an "online only" world as well as dynamic keywords. 

That said, regardless of if they're stored "normally" or not, there's no reason (other than not wanting to put the effort into it) they can't add keyword syncing as part of the CC <-> Classic sync.

One thing though - to do this they'd have to change the keywording in CC and mobile to match the heirarchy set up and features in classic.  In CC you have a flat list of keywords, plus whatever hidden keywords that are used for their AI searching (possibly - no idea how they do that part of it).  In Classic you have keywords that contain other keywords as synonyms, a keyword hierarchy, keywords that are "people" keywords or not, keywords from the hierarchy that export with the image or not, etc.

To match this up you'd have to duplicate that entire set up and functionality inside CC and LR Mobile and web.  Not impossible of course, but a fair chunk of work, and my guess is that it would also go against the "simplicity" that they seem to want for the CC ecosystem, which could be a reason they're choosing not to do it.

An alternative would be to do some sort of mangling of the keywords (flatten the entire hierarchy when going from Classic -> CC, and then sync the flattened keywords back to Classic) and as someone with some fairly in depth keywords, I sure as hell don't want that.

Another alternative would be to display all the keywords as just a list when it syncs to CC (ie: go from people -> clients -> weddings -> Bob Jones, Events -> Wedding, Places -> Weddings -> Blah Golf Course which would just turn into "Bob Jones, Wedding, Blah Golf Course"), and then I guess any additional keywords get added back as a root keywords (so you tag "Mary Jones" and that goes into just a single keywords in Classic).  But what if you delete "Bob Jones".  When it syncs back to Classic would people -> clients -> weddings stay or would / should it remove the entire hierarchy because you removed the "end" keyword?

I'm not saying it's impossible, just that there are a lot of edge cases which could turn into doing a ton of changes in the CC version.  Oh, and don't forget that since CC, Mobile and Web are pretty much the same, all the theoretical new keywording hierarchy and synonyms and person vs not person (and the person tagging would probably mean you'd need to implement face tagging and recognition in CC as well) and export or not would have to show up in web and ios and ipad os.

I want to see it as much as anyone else, but I think it's more complicated than "it's not a technical decision but rather one to piss off customers".

This, again, proves it’s not a technical decision but rather one to piss off customers.

I've stayed out of this because I have zero use for the online ecosystem.

However, its disingenuous to claim that hierarchical keywords cannot be maintained by Lightroom CC et al.

Keywords are plain text and are written into the file as "parent" + separator + "child." In other words, "Bird|Sparrow" would be a hierarchical keyword in the file.

ALL of the interpretation is done on the client side. So the photo viewing app reads the metadata and determines that "|" is a separator.

The easiest route would be preserve the hierarchy as it is written in the file and let each app interpret it. Lightroom CC uses a flat structure where "Bird|Sparrow" is the keyword and either ignores "Bird" or shows it. Lightroom Classic interprets it as hierarchical.

Adobe already deals with this problem in Bridge, which can use either flat or hierarchical keywords.

https://helpx.adobe.com/bridge/kb/nested-hierarchal-keywording-bridge.html

Because « syncing strings is a technical difficulty », then « no further sync development will occur on classic ».

Now you know how Adobe treats you and thanks you for your money! Come again!