P: Better keyword management

I am currently seriously considering buying Canto single user to do my keywording in Canto and not bother purchasing an upgrade to Lightroom 5 as I think the keywording in Canto will be more flexible to my needs than can be done in Lightroom. I would prefere to do everything in the same programme though but if no keywording upgrades come to LR soon then Canto it is ( I have an old Mediadex licence that I used before switching the catalogue to LR so can get Canto for 50% discount)

And zero keyword bug fixes, or did I miss something?

Another year, another release and zero keyword enhancements. :-(

-louie

Is there still time to include some of these marvelous suggestions in LR4?!?
It seems a shame that the Lightroom team has not taken the opportunity to overhaul keywording and take the lead as an asset management software. I hear many complaints about Lightroom 3s keywording facility but it appears nothing is changing as a new version is rolled out.

Paul Wasserman write "What's the point of participating in these forums if key workflow features keep getting ignored, often in favor of one more bullet point for the features list.".

That's a very good question. I don't see any of the LR4 highlights anywhere near the top of the feature request list. Are participants of this forum regarded as geeks who do not represent the majority of (future) Lightroom users?

I too would prefer to see better keywording facilities built-in to LR. But given that Adobe's resources are finite, a cheaper way for Adobe to ameliorate users' needs might be to enhance the SDK to provide a complete set of fast keyword operations. Then plugins could meet the various needs of many users, such as batch reorganizing, changing keyword attributes such as Include On Export, finding orphan keywords, tagging optimized for particular workflows, and such.

Currently, the SDK's support for keywords is missing the following:

- The ability to change the name, attributes (Include on Export, Export Containing Keywords, Export Synonyms), and synonyms of existing keywords.

- Get the count of the number of photos to which the keyword is assigned.

- Get the exact list of photos to which a keyword is assigned (smart collections only provide an approximate list, in general).

- Delete a keyword.

- Change the parent of a keyword.

- Fast access to keywords. Currently the SDK lets plugins access about 100 keywords per second on Windows, which is impracticably slow for large hierarchies. (It's about 6 times faster on Mac.) A cheap improvement would be to provide batch access to the keywords, similar to the batch access to metadata, avoiding the likely culprit, the LR task scheduler on Windows.

Plug-ins are almost never as good as having the functionality built-in, but they're often much better than nothing.

It would be interesting to know if this resolves the problem for you, Greg. If so, would it be right for Lightroom to bypass non-alphabetical sorting as an exceptional workflow for Alamy and instead put any development effort into other aspects of key wording?

John Beardsworth: I don't believe alpha ordering of keywords is an IPTC standard, and yes, in my case I'm largely interested in making the workflow faster/easier with Alamy (especially since they require keywords to be divided in essential, main, etc.). The plugin looks promising - I'll give it a try.

Still, I don't see why Lightroom can't give us the option of alpha or user-determined priorty ordering of keywords. Especially annoying is if you keyword in Bridge/Photoshop and then import the image to LR, the keyword order is changed.

What's particularly disappointing is the fact that fixing the forced alphabetical sort of keywords has been asked for in every version.

What's the point of participating in these forums if key workflow features keep getting ignored, often in favor of one more bullet point for the features list.

Is retaining the alphabetical order of keywords an IPTC standard - I don't think so - or is this need peculiar to how Alamy rank images? If it is only an Alamy thing, there is a plugin which may help - see http://www.lightroom-plugins.com/Alam...