How to use the Keyword-Panel effectively?

Thanks for your answer. I had replied you already yesterday, but I ran into this forum bug and couldn't post...

Over the weekend, I have done some research and got Bridge to behave a little better.

My terrible keyword-experience might get caused by using hierarchical keywords in a combination of Square Brackets (Hide Parent) and Normal hierarchical keywords (without brackets). Using both normal hierarchical structures and hidden parents doesn't seem to work well (no word about this in the docs). During my research I even found a thread where you, Lumigraphics expressed your problems with hidden parents ('had to edit database manually to fix it').

This was the setup we had until recently...

[Project Root]
     [Project Main Category 1]
          Subkeyword
          Subkeyword
               Sub-Subkeyword
               Sub-Subkeyword
              50 more...

          Subkeyword
          Sub-Subkeyword
          Sub-Subkeyword
          20 more...


     [Project Main Category 2]
          Subkeyword
          Subkeyword
          20 more...

I have now removed all hierarchy but the three parents in brackets. I need to test further, but in my first tests I could assign keywords to more than just two or three images – and I even can change my mind later – something which made things go totally haywire before. There are still problems left though – I still very often run into pop-ups which tell me that Bridge could not assign the keyword. Upon second try (check box in Keyword Panel again) assignment usually works – but I prefer not to perform this manual clean-up every time.

Why use the square brackets?
I want to have a visible "folder" structure in the Bridge GUI so that I can collapse all keywords for the current project into just one folder. On file level, we prefer not to write hierarchical keywords. Parents should not be assignable, and we don't want their name to appear anywhere output in file metadata – parents should purely work as an organizational structure (Project-Name, File Sources, Brands...) for Editors sitting in front of Bridge.

This all may be easier understood when I explain our output goal. We are not organizing a typical collection of images. All images with this keyword-treatment are used in a single, somewhat larger web-project. In the CMS's Media Library, which by default is an unstructured basin, these keywords help us categorize assets for various output goals. When published, all Image-Metadata is removed by the CDN, as it delivers assets in the size and format the requesting Browser can chew.

If I still run into issues, I might remove the hierarchy altogether. We could group all keywords of a certain type by using a common suffix so that they were listed as groups. The only problem with a flat structure I see is that one can't minimize this list in the Bridge Keywords-Panel. Such could get in the way when working with other projects. So far, I wanted to avoid working with more than one keyword-lists, swapping them out, depending on work-context sure isn't very convenient.

As you asked... OS: Win 10, 6 Core i7 CPU, 32 GB RAM. Superfast M2 SSDs. OS got newly set up in May – it should be fine. All files are either PSD or PNG, written to local disk.