Cleanup keywords after import from Photoshop Elements

Question

I recently switched from Photoshop Elements to Photoshop CC and imported my PSE catalog into Lightroom Classic. It actually went pretty smoothly--probably easier than I anticipated. One problem I do have, though, is that all of my keywords that were imported are all messed up. In PSE I used hierarchical keywords so, for example, I had a category called "Buildings" and under that was another keyword "churches". Lightroom apparently does not support hierarchical keywords, so it captured them as "Churches<Buildings." Then next to that it reapeats "Churches" alone. Is there any easy way of cleaning this up? I understand that I would loose the hierarchy.

Thanks.

johnrellis · Answer

In your example, the photo has two separate keywords Church and Church < Buildings. Normally, LR doesn't display the ancestors of a hierarchical keyword in the Keywording panel. But if there are two keywords with the same name (e.g. "Church"), then LR will display enough of their ancestors in the hierarchy to distinguish them.

So this example shows your keyword list has two keywords, Church and Buildings > Church (theoretically, there could be a common ancestor to the two keywords, e.g. Landmarks > Church and Landmarks > Buildings > Church, but LR doesn't need to show Landmarks > to distinguish the two keywords). You can see the occurrences of Church in your keyword list by going to the Keyword List panel and typing "church" in the Filter Keywords box.

I think what likely happened is that LR bungled the conversion of hierarchical keywords, and for every photo assigned K1 > K2 in PSE, it explicitly assigned both K1 and K1 > K2. E.g. in PSE, the photo was assigned just Buildings > Church, but LR assigned the photo both Buildings > Church and Church. (Or maybe PSE assigned both keywords to the photo internally, or maybe you did.)

When I converted from PSE 8 to LR 3 11 years ago, the conversion was quite buggy, so I ended up programming my own ad hoc conversion. I don't remember this particular bug, but it could have been present.

Here's a recipe for deleting the keyword Church from every photo that has both Church and Buildings > Church:

1. In the Navigator panel on the left, click All Photographs.

2. Do the menu command Photo > Stacking > Expand All Stacks.

3. If you don't see the Library Filter bar at the top, do View > Show Filter Bar.

4. Click on None to disable any currently applied filters.

5. Click on Metadata, and then add two Keyword columns:

6. Click on Church in the first column and Church < Buildings in the second column. This shows all photos that have both keywords.

7. Selectd all the displayed photos.

8. In the Keywording panel, select Church and delete it.

9. If the keyword Church now shows a count of 0 in the Keyword List panel, you know it isn't assigned to any other photos and you can safely delete it.

If someone recommends using smart collections instead, don't -- the Metadata browser does exact match on keywords, whereas smart collections don't (unless you use a specific trick, which even then isn't perfect).

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