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Keywords panel - sort by "keywords in use first"? NOT alphabetical? Can do?

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
March 20, 2025
2 replies
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Hello, the keywords panel is very very long in my case. Can i sort the keywords panel so that all keywords in use on selected pics or folders appear on top - not strictly alphabetical, but sorted by usage ? (I have the newest LR Classic on Windows.)

I understand that i could remove folders and then delete unused keywords from the list. But i don't want to remove folders - i just want the "Keywords" panel to focus on those keywords that are within the files currently selected or displayed, not equally showing keywords for files not under consideration at the moment.

I also understand that i could delete or add keywords in the "Keywording"-panel, but that is sometimes tricky especially when deleting a keyword that has accidentally been used on 200 of 300 files. (I know how to do that, but i don't like the procedure.)

So i want to sort the "Keywords" panel by keywords in use - can do?

Thanks!

Windows

Correct answer dj_paige

No sorting tools are available for Keyword Panel.

None of my suggestions below is exactly what you want.

If you want keywords in use on selected photos, this can be done in the Filter Bar.
You can somewhat force a "sort order" by changing your keywords from Lighthouses, Rivers, Waterfalls to 1 Waterfalls, 2 Rivers, 3 Lighthouses.
Another alternative is to create hierarchical keywords.

Rob_Cullen

Community Expert

If you would be happy with nine keywords for "selected pics or folders" you can create a Keyword Set.

You can create multiple Keyword Sets, and swap the Set for another nine KWs. Click a KW button to add it to selected photos.

Also if you hold down the [ALT] key you can then use a numeric keypad to add from the nine available KWs in the Set- by number:

Regards. My System: Windows-11, Lightroom-Classic 15.3, Photoshop 27.5, ACR 18.3, Lightroom 9.3, Lr-iOS 10.4.0, Bridge 16.0.3 .

H

Henrik2000Author

Known Participant

Hello DJ Paige and Rob, thanks for your detailed suggestions including screenshots!

I think none of them works for me. I have a huge number of pics in Lightroom with hundreds of different keywords. Sometimes I need to inspect 1 folder to see if by accident I applied some wrong keywords. If I knew the keywords I'm looking for, I could filter, but often I don't know what I'm looking for – and then I have to go through the long whole list.

Thanks for suggesting the filter bar, I started to try that now, but it takes a lot of space (and the keyboard shortcut for the filter bar doesn't seem to work with my non-English keyboard).
Numbering the keywords to "1 Waterfalls, 2 Rivers, 3 Lighthouses", as suggested, would be impractical, even if I only did this for some of the keywords. Also my keywords are seen and maybe used by others, so I want to present the plain word without a number in front of it.
Hierarchical sorting might be an idea – or might have been, if I had started that long ago. I will play with the suggestion.
Just nine keywords in a keyword set don't seem to help here, but I will play with the suggestion.

I had thought it a very natural wish to sort the Keywords Panel by keywords usage – at least sorted in groups by "used everywhere", "used in some", "not used anywhere" and alphabetically within these groups. It confused me that I didn't find these options, so I asked here, feeling silly.

But then, I think you also

cannot sort pictures by file size and
the number of pictures selected is not shown –

two basics offered by any other software, and certainly easy to implement, but omitted by Lightroom, just like keyword sorting by usage.

EDIT: To somewhat shorten the list, i now removed several big folders from Lightroom. The keywords etc are stored within the files, so i can import the folders later again.

dj_paige

Legend

the number of pictures selected is not shown

This is shown — press F6 to make the filmstrip appear (if it is not already shown), the number of selected photos is shown

cannot sort pictures by file size

Actually, I think this is a good thing to not allow a sort by file size, as file size is rarely an indicator of anything that has meaning photographically, it certainly does not indicate quality. So, good job on this, Adobe.

Or did you mean "sort by pixel dimensions"? This is a feature of LrC

dj_paigeCorrect answer

Legend

No sorting tools are available for Keyword Panel.

None of my suggestions below is exactly what you want.

If you want keywords in use on selected photos, this can be done in the Filter Bar.
You can somewhat force a "sort order" by changing your keywords from Lighthouses, Rivers, Waterfalls to 1 Waterfalls, 2 Rivers, 3 Lighthouses.
Another alternative is to create hierarchical keywords.

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