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

Again rubbish - you really dont know what you're on about here...

Load Bridge.  Find whatever images you want.  Right click, "File Info...".

Then paste your keywords in.  Click OK.  Keywords remain in pasted order for uploading.

Its the only way most of us submitting to Adobe Stock can do it - export from lightroom (the plugin is useless for this reason) then in Bridge select and paste in the keywords from your spreadsheet or database in priority order.

Upload there, order is preserved and you can submit immediately.

It adds a lot of time to the workflow.  So its clear (i) there is no break of standards (ii) Adobe software CAN support it and (iii) the problem is Lightroom does not.

We've had to use this workaround for many many years when in reality its about 2 lines of code changes in LR to offer it as an option.

(You can also do it directly via Windows Explorer, C1 and pretty much every other library based app.)

LR is the outlier here in not supporting it.

@richard_whitcombe 

This is not true. Please do not post incorrect information.

If you look at the Keyword panel and the Filter panel, in both places your keywords are sorted into alphabetical order.

Also, Bridge has some significant bugs. For example, dc:subject and lr:hierarchicalSubject can be out of sync and not even have the same keywords saved or in the same order. This can be a huge problem if you are using Bridge and Lightroom Classic together as each app will mangle the other app's keywords.

And yes these bugs have been reported. Nobody seems to care.

The standard doesn't care about keyword order - it doesnt specify alphabetical, it doesn't specify ordering at all.

Therefore, ordered keywords are completely within specification.

Many places DO read and write ordered keywords, some use them in that order.  Its completely compliant.

Its also forgetting the important part that Adobe Bridge *DOES* support and write ordered keywords to files.  Its only Lightroom that doesn't.

So even Adobe's own products can do this.

Agreed, the IPTC, XMP, and MWG standards are silent on whether ordering should be preserved by readers and writers.

@richard_whitcombe

Again, the standard doesn't support ordered keywords, which are physically written to the file in whatever order the app decides and READ from the file the same way.

The IPTC and XMP standards are silent on whether order of keywords should be preserved -- some apps do, some apps don't. It would be technically straightforward for LR to preserve the order of keywords in the metadata fields.  But I doubt that Adobe will implement it -- when LR Cloud was released several years ago (now called "Lightroom"), they explicitly stated they were focusing their efforts in LR Classic on Develop and photo features like Merge (things that are shared with Camera Raw and Lightroom Cloud).  And indeed, they've put little effort into Library.

You say that but ultimately you can reinsert keywords in Bridge in whatever order you want and that order is conserved throughout other changes.

So it can work and even works in other Adobe products.  Just not Lightroom.

You are probably NEVER going to get custom ordering of keywords. It isn't part of the XMP standard and every app would need to be changed to preserve order.

To get custom ordering with the current standard, you would have to delete and rewrite ALL keywords from the file every time you made any change, and in multiple namespaces that already aren't necessarily in sync.

Stock agencies need to find a better way to handle this, maybe uploading a sidecar text file with ordered keywords or somesuch.

And don't scream at me because you don't like the answer. The standard isn't really compatible with what you want.

I want Lightroom Classic to LEAVE My Keywords ALONE, and that includes the ORDER.  I import a set of TIF files containing my existing Windows Tags ("Keywords") into Lightroom and export them as a set of JPG files.  I then view my new JPG images in Windows, where I see that Lightroom has destroyed the functionality of my personal Tagging system (sorting/grouping capabilities).   For example:

My Tags (as I specified them in Windows on my TIF files):
   2003; Spring; Apr; 3

My Tags (after Lightroom scrambles them on the exported JPG files):
   3; 2003; Apr; Spring

When is Lightroom finally going to address this issue?