P: Add an option to always export complete keyword hierarchy

The assumption on my part, reinforced specifically Martin Evening in his Lightroom book and others, is that Lightroom hierarchical keywords are intended as Rob says for internal use. That is to say if you are exporting with the intent of going back into a LR catalog then you should check this option. The new bug fix changes that and now assumes that "Exporting" is to create images only for external use.

To remove any part of the hierarchy is to remove some of the information that was originally intended. To completely loose the ability to retain the complete keyword hierarchy is now just as much a bug as it was before when it always kept the whole hierarchy.

The purpose of my suggested enhancement is to at least allow the user to choose which method is appropriate for their needs. There is no other way in LR to batch process images except to "Export" them and "Export" even has the option to automatically import the results back into your catalog. So it was clearly designed with that in mind.

When one says "do not export" they mean "do not export" when export is destined for external consumption. When one is converting format of master..., this setting must be ignored.

One obvious solution is to make all keywords exportable, and then use custom metadata instead of private keywords. But that won't work either, since custom metadata is lost when converting format of master - same problem......

This is listed in the "bugs fixed" area on Lightroom Journal:

"When exporting images with the “Write Keywords as Lightroom Hierarchy” enabled, keywords with “Include on Export” deselected would still have been included on export"

To the uninitiated like me, that sounds like a genuine bug (they're included even though "include" is deselected). I'm unclear as to what you want. You want a third level between having the "Include" selected and deselected - one where they'd be included even if "include" is deselected? Sound's quite non-intuitive. Is that because you were using the bug as an advantage for a long time so this is for historical reasons?

PS I did the following search: "lightroom hierarchical keyword export " and nothing in the first four pages has any thing about the problem they fixed but there are many issues that if they were addressed would make some real improvements with working with keywords.

Your timing is impeccable. John also suggested this and I just now finished testing a workaround that uses Jeffery Friedl's Metadata Wrangler on the export to remove all of the keywords followed by Syncomatic after the HDR image is imported back into the catalog.

This is IMHO of course a kludgy workaround to an unnecessary problem created by Adobe by not really thinking through all the possible side effects of this "fix" to 3.5. However it does work so that I am no longer polluting my keyword controlled vocabulary that I have spent dozens of hours working on to get just the way I want it. So it is nominally better than having to use 3.4.1.

Yup, my attitude is showing... It is just that I am quite frustrated. I just spent the last 8 months working with NIK helping them sort out the problems they were having with keywords and just as that seemed all resolved Adobe goes and changes LR and breaks things again. On top of that, the one thing about that they choose to "fix" is something no one here is complaining about and any of the issues like, searching on synonyms, searching for keywords that contain spaces and many more have so far been completely ignored. (end of grumbling)

In the mean time, is it possible to use jb's syncomatic or some such thing to transfer private keywords after exporting?

This is another reason why "Export" needs this behavior reenabled. I think that al lot of people are using it this way.

Now that private keywords are ALWAYS removed I can't think of any other way that you can batch process images and still retain all your keyword data.

Hopefully more people will realize that this is happening and add their support for this change.

Louis,
I would also like to see the option for this to work the way it did before LR 3.5. I need it to preserve my hierarchy as I export raw images to jpegs and keep them both in the same catalog. But when I export them for other purposes that do not support hierarchies (photo sharing sites like Flickr and PicasaWeb) and do not stay in my catalog , I have not included the top level hierarchy tag. (I have a hierarchy with only five top level tags for categorization: Event, Keyword, People, Place, Source)

Thanks,
Mike

Having a clean and robust interface to all metadata is definitely a good idea. Perhaps it should have its own topic created. I would fully support that.

For now I would hopefully like this topic to stay focused on just this one enhancement that brings back a feature that I and anyone else who uses HDR Efex Pro needs. I don't know of any other way you can batch process images out of Lightroom except for Export and it is now trashing my keyword database.

The fix should be pretty simple, just make the bug fix conditional and allow the users to select which behavior they want.

I am curious to see if anyone at Adobe will even comment.

tks,

-louie

Good idea, and I'd like to propose a more general solution:

Perhaps, instead of a checkbox for "Minimize Metadata", a radio button instead:

"Maximize Metadata"
"Minimize Metadata"
"Normal Metadata"

Where "Maximize Metadata" means "Preserve All Metadata" - used for converting "Masters" to another format... - it would preserve keyword hierarchy regardless of include-on-(normal)-export setting.

The reason I suggest this is Hierarchical Keywords is just one type of metadata lost when exporting as master. The other most notable at the moment is Custom Metadata, which is lost upon export, when re-adding to catalog.

Now that I think about it, a sheet with each item on it, would be even better (savable as preset). I think there is a plugin "export filter" to do this (? - jf maybe?), but it does not include custom metadata, nor does it work with publishing services. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong about that.

Plugin SDK Note: If that "transfer all or selected metadata" function were also accessible as SDK function (e.g. to go with catalog:addPhoto method, or stand-alone), then we'd really be having things... :-)

Cheers,
Rob