Can keywords made in Bridge and/or Lightroom be seen by any other program?

[Hamza25291388dqei]

Esp with the heirachy feature they provide.

[Lumigraphics]

First of all keywords are written to image files as plain text, tagged in XML format. So yes, lots of apps can read them. HOWEVER...

Metadata is organized in "namespaces" which designates where and how data is stored in a file. Keywords can be written to as many as five namespaces and image apps may or may not read all of those.

Hierarchical keywords are simply text with a delimiter (for example, "bird|raptor|hawk"). Reading and writing and recognizing hierarchical keywords is up to a specific app. In Bridge, you can actually choose how to handle these cases. So you'll want to check the documentation for your app to see how it works.

[Hamza25291388dqei]

Good to know. So it seems there's no guarantee it'll be the same in some future software I may use!

I'll do some more reading on namespaces and how keywords are stored.

Are there international standards for this kind of stuff?

[gregreser]

Yes, the IPTC standard is used world wide

http://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/specification/IPTC-PhotoMetadata

[gregreser]

You'll see IPTC metadata fields in most popular photo software and they follow the standard. If they don't, someone usually points it out very quickly.

The problem is when people build custom scripts or specialized apps and they get the standard wrong, or ignore it altogether.

[Lumigraphics]

https://developer.adobe.com/xmp/docs/XMPNamespaces/

However, the Lightroom and Microsoft namespaces (both of which can contain keywords) are not mentioned here.

[gregreser]

True. You would expect Adobe to include Lightroom there, for sure.