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

Adding my voice to the chorus...

I spent at least 100 hours of my life transitioning my photo library from Aperture to Lightroom, confident that that was the right path forward.

I maintained all the metadata because I rely on it to easily find any image on mobile devices. The simplest (and should be most basic!) example is searching by keywords on my phone. My friends, family, coworkers, and clients have always appreciated my ability to almost instantly pull up any photo in the middle of casual conversation. That's a very valuable tool and something countless of us have spent untold hours making possible.

Ironically, my workflow now involves exporting finished photos *from* Lightroom *to* Apple Photos, because Apple's Photos app handles searching by the keywords quite well. This is crazy and should not be so difficult! It's a feature even most casual users would enjoy.

So I feel your pain but hopefully it's not hopelessness forever... if Adobe were to implement some basic functionality with their cloud service, there would be no further conversation about it.

Just sync the damn keywords and it will bring joy to everyone who gets to see the fruits of our labor!

This issue is now three years old and still with users actively sharing their frustrations. It's a basic functionality that's keeping many of us from using CC. A small technical hurdle but clearly held up somewhere in management. Adobe, we need this. Let the programmers make it happen and we will all happily continue supporting your products. Meantime we are coming up with convoluted solutions of our own that cost us a ridiculous number of hours and force us to break out of your cloud.

I hear you on the silence and blood pressure. I'm starting to get deja vu. All the Aperture users were dying to hear from Apple and what the future of their favourite software would be. I held out till the end having countless hours invested in my data. Eventually they released the upgrade path: Photos - a dumbed down consumer cloud program. I felt duped - a dummy for not choosing Lightroom in the first place. So I migrated to Lightroom and became an avid fan but still bitter from loosing all my edits and data unique to Aperture. Here I am again hanging on to older software waiting to hear about it's future and dissatisfied with the path presented. What's frustrating is it's so close - all I'm asking for is data parity and I'll migrate! Failing that I'll continue to use Classic and beg for better syncing with the cloud ecosystem.

Don't get me wrong Adobe doesn't appear to be abandoning it pro users to the degree Apple did but I still feel hopeless.

Ever feel like you are whistling in the wind? 

This thread, if anything, should indicate to Adobe that this is a problem that deserves some sort of a response other than the "it can't be done" ones they've provided so far and to which several people (including myself) have offered viable ways to do it.  These range from 'add hierarchical KW's to Cloud based system" to a way to assure a non conflict sync between the hierarchical Classic and the flat CC worlds. 

But all we hear from Adobe is silence, and the less we hear the higher our blood pressure goes, the higher our frustration level rises, and the angrier we get.   

I don't know how long a problem thread like this needs to get or how many "Likes" on a thread it takes to get this off the dime, but apparently we're not there yet.  At some point, some high level person at Adobe made a strategic decision that prevents the keyword sycing from seeing the light of day.  I don't know what that decision was.  Maybe it is that LR Cloud based is intended to replace Classic at some point.  Maybe it is that LR Cloud was always intended to be a "Lightroom Light" or "dumbed down" sort of application aimed at a different audience than Classic.  It is hard to know.  However it is not hard to observe that so far Adobe apparently has not seen fit to re-evaluate that strategy.  

When I was a manager in computer application development we had a word for this.  We called it "Married to an idea".  It happens when someone (usually a high level person) sells an idea which sounds good at the time and in one way or another bets their credibility (or perhaps their career with that company) on that idea.  Then when it turns out that  things unfold differently than originally anticipated they won't let go of that original idea and just cling to it like gold even though it is now no longer a wise strategy.  They just don't want to "look bad" or "lose face" so they just keep going and ignoring all evidence that what had been a good idea at one time is now the opposite.  Can I prove any of this?  No.  Have I seen it dozens of times?  Yes.  Does the evidence fit this scenario?  Yes. 
Am I optimistic that this will change?  No.  Am I hopeful that it will change?  Yes.

OK,  I'll climb down off my soap box now and go back to my corner.. 

This decision by Adobe is baffling. I tried the keyword feature on CC and it was a nightmare. I can't see the AI keywords? I can't search even my own keywords if I don't have an internet connection? I get that there are two audiences - "classic" vs "mobile". But why wouldn't "classic" users want cloud capability? I've read many people say "because Adobe wants more money; driving everyone to CC because it's cloud based". But they're already getting my money! They won't get more by getting me to switch to CC. I pay monthly for classic. I'm willing to pay more monthly for cloud storage. But instead they are trying for artificially tie "cloud" with "dumbed down mobile". There is surely an audience for that, but they are killing the rest of us. I was literally about to pay for 1Tb of cloud storage with them (more money for them!), but now that I fully understand their keyword "strategy", I'm not. It's really unclear is this choice is creating more revenue for them. Sigh. Off to look for alternatives...

When is going to be this possible? I think it would be very usefull for everyone

the Adobe response is just a "we don't want to expend resources on this as we don't think it will make us any money, so just tell people that it can't be done due to different structures" response. 

 I have written the logic of how it could be done which is in this thread someplace.  Also, it seems it's not a problem for them with the first sync, but that was probably just an accident where the keywords happened to be in the Smart Preview at the time.  

The closest I've seen is Mylio.  But, in order to get your metadata to sync over, it requires you to save it to the file.  https://support.mylio.com/from-lightroom/

The closest I've seen is Mylio.  But, in order to get your metadata to sync over, it requires you to save it to the file.  https://support.mylio.com/from-lightroom/

Oh I 100% agree!  Just that there seem to be a lot of people asking "can I do this" or "why doesn't it work" and ignoring the answer that says exactly why.

Hopefully Adobe will see this thread and realize this is something people want, but based on the answers they've given, I would say that there's little chance of this, they seem to have made their minds up about it.