Bridge 14.0 Keyword Lists Disappear

[sjp-picker]

My meticulously constructed keyword lists have disappeared. I have loaded folder after folder & selected all images (CTRL+A) in them to reconstruct the list. Then right-click on the Keywords tab > Export to a .txt file, and ... Guess what? There is nothing in the file! Does anyone know a way to resurrect keyword lists?

[sjp-picker · Accepted solution]

P.S., 2 hours later...

With BRIDGE closed, I found the file containing the keyword list (Adobe Bridge Keywords.xml) from the previous version of BRIDGE in C:\Users\XXXX\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Bridge 2023 and copied it to  C:\Users\XXXX\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Bridge 2024. Ran BRIDGE and the list was resurrected!  For some reason, the BRIDGE update process failed to do this, even though I specified that it should copy settings etc from the previous version.

[Stephen Marsh]

@sjp-picker  - I'm glad you sorted things out!

More on this at my blog:

https://prepression.blogspot.com/2016/11/bridge-restoring-lost-keyword-xml-file.html

[polyxo]

I just lost my list with 14.x  too (wasn't deleted but almost all entries cleared). We had a backup and only lost a few keywords.

A bit odd to see several reports and upvotes in a short time. This seems to happen regularly.

[Abu25]

Hi,

Thanks for your feedback.

Could you please share the following details to better investigate the issue at sharewithbr@adobe.com and mention this thread.

1. Could you please share the video recording of the issue?
   2. Steps that you performed when the keywords were deleted for the very first time.
   
   We might reach out to you for more information , if required.
   
   
   Thanks,
   Bridge Team

[polyxo]

@Abu25 I cannot imagine that you find someone who states: 'I just performed action xy and this cleared / deleted my Keyword list'. It's even more unrealistic to expect users to grab a video of this event. Looking into logs / implementing some tracker might be a starting point.

When working in Bridge, users don't always watch the keyword list – its Tab might not even be visible when the problem occurs. In my case, the keyword list did not get deleted, but it was almost empty. This very much looks like a failed file-writing attempt with no recovery mechanism in place. It's not unlikely that I noticed the file corruption days later – when I needed to set keywords next time.

[nigelb36095022]

Same problem for me.
However, nothing in my XML files from previous versions AND I specifically stopped atomatic updating because of a similar problem a couple of years ago. Lucky that I have a text file backups because I also use Digikam.

Digikam is so much faster to use but it won't let me look for two keywords at the same time.
When it does I will ditch Bridge.