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Participant
August 29, 2013
Released

P: Custom sort order of keywords (instead of alphabetic).

  • August 29, 2013
  • 124 replies
  • 7654 views

Lightroom needs to stop re-ordering our keywords into an alphabetical order. People who are keywording for stock agencies and other purposes need to order their keywords most important and relevant first. Lightroom ruins this for us. I can't believe it's version 5 and Lightroom hasn't figured this out. Lightroom is single-handedly ruining our sales based on keyword searches. Thanks Adobe

124 replies

Rikk Flohr_Photography
Community Manager
July 16, 2026
The following idea has been merged into this idea:

All the votes have been transferred into this idea.
Rikk Flohr: Adobe Photography Org
Known Participant
October 27, 2024

Hopefully Adobe will finally do fix to this after 11 years. What they are waiting for?

johnrellis
Legend
December 22, 2022

@maumilu, note that the feature added in LR 11 only applies to publishing photos to Adobe Stock and not other agencies:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-ideas/p-custom-sort-order-of-keywords-instead-of-alphabetic/idc-p/12526371#M13291 

Rikk Flohr_Photography
Community Manager
December 22, 2022

@maumilu  Install Lightroom Classic 11.0 or later.  Current is 12.1

Rikk Flohr: Adobe Photography Org
Participant
December 22, 2022

@Rikk Flohr: Photography Unfortunately I am not able to find any related updated in den Creative cloud Desktop app when searching for "Max 2021 Photography products". Which term should be entered in order to find the required update to allow Lightroom to export images with keywords in non-alphabetical (original) order? 

 

My region is btw Germany.

 

Thanks in advance.

johnrellis
Legend
October 2, 2022

@Al_W_PhotoVideo, you might consider another workaround: Create a virtual copy of each photo you upload to an agency, and keyword the virtual copy just for that agency.

Al_W_PhotoVideo
Participant
October 1, 2022

I am just considering entering the Stock Photo-Video market as a contributor.  As a long-time user of LR I want to use it whenever possible.  Based on previous discussions it appears to me that the biggest need is for a TWO TIERED approach to keywords rather than a pure ordering of all keywords.  What I mean is:  I would be happy to have an area for entering PRIMARY keywords (top ten) and SECONDARY keywords (the rest) with the combination of the two also stored behind the scenes together with the PRIMARY keywords listed first.  This may not be practical, but another way for LR programmers to consider how to meet the stock contributors needs.  The challenge is that EACH image needs to be able to have this differentiation.  It would not be sufficient to RANK or WEIGHT the keyword library list (though that could help) because the ranking is based on perceived USE.  As I begin uploading stock images and footage I will have to see which work arounds work best for me.  Thanks for all who have tried to get Adobe to address this important need.

Known Participant
August 22, 2022

When LRc will have fix metadata handling for keywords? LRc is sorting the metadata keywords alphabetically even if there is a need to keep it in order as written. E.G Adobe stock requires that the most relevant keywords are the first one in the list.  

Known Participant
February 14, 2022

I have just gone through a pile of photos and used the face recognition feature.  All went fine, however when I look at the keyword tags in Lightroom Classic, or export a file and look at the properties, the order of the keywords looks to be sorted alphabetically. However one of the main reasons I wanted to tag the photos was so that I can share the photos and the names of the people in them with others.

 

After I export the photos people will know who's in the photo, but not where they are in the photo.  Is there an option to store the keyword list in an order that would relate to the face recognition that's been marked in the photo, for example from left to right across the photo?

 

Even if I manually change the order of the keywords to match the photo, it goes back to the original order once I come back to it.  Very annoying.

 

I look forward to discovering a solution.

Rob_Cullen
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 14, 2022

I do not know that that is possible.

I can only think to supply an accompanying screen-clip for each photo that illustrates names-

Regards. My System: Windows-11, Lightroom-Classic 15.4.1, Photoshop 27.8, ACR 18.4, Lightroom 9.4, Lr-iOS 10.4.0, Bridge 16.0.3 .
johnrellis
Legend
December 5, 2021

It occurred to me that you can export the ordered keywords in the industry standard fields (that other apps and services see) by writing a Mac shell script with these lines:

#!/bin/sh

/usr/local/bin/exiftool '-xmp:subject<xmp:weightedflatsubject' '-iptc:keywords<xmp:weightedflatsubject' "$1"

 

Make the script executable by doing "chmod +x <script>".

 

In the Export settings Post-Processing, set After Export: Open In Other Applications, and choose the shell script.

 

You should be able to do the equivalent on Windows with .bat files -- it's left as an exercise for the reader.