Keywording Issue

[Guest]

Can someone please explain to me how to remove keywords from within Bridge. The Manual says:  

"To delete a keyword, select the keyword by clicking its name, and then click the Delete Keyword button at the bottom of the panel or choose Delete from the panel menu."

When I do that, about 15 to 20 seconds later the keyword reappears. In fact, in most cases if I've deselected the keyword (cleared the box), a few seconds later the box becomes rechecked again on its own. I can't turn it off. I have repeated this process now literally 100's of times and the results are the same. So far the only way I've been able to actually delete a keyword is to select all the files in a folder and click on the box to the left of the keyword. Typically the keyword is at a "-" state (only some files have that keyword applied) so clicking it applies it to all files. I then have to wait quite a few seconds to close to a minute or so while the metadata finishes writing. Then I need to click the box again to deselect all the images from that keyword and again wait for the metadata to finish writing. After that I can delete the keyword, assuming the boxes haven't all rechecked themselves again. At this rate, it will take me until V2021 is released to complete this action. So obviously there is something I'm missing here and I'm hoping someone can explain to me why I can't simply hit the Delete key with the keyword highlighted regardless of whether it's attached to files or not. Thanks much.

iMac 27 5K, 32 GB RAM, Catalina 10.15.4

Bridge 10.0.4.157 (CC 2020)

Thanks.

[Lumigraphics]

Are you trying to remove keywords from your files? If a keyword is in any file, you'll see it in Bridge.

[Guest]

Trying to remove them from the set of images I have in a specific folder. It seems that when I click the box to remove the "assignment", it just reassigns itself. To be honest I worked on this until 1 this morning and was back at it by 6. I'm a little buffaloed at the moment. Basically as the manual states, you should just be able to right click a keyword and delete it. What it doesn't say is that the keyword has to be unassigned to all the other images in other locations, which I didn't know about (I thought the images were independent of other files or databases - i.e. Lightroom). Many of the keywords are in italics, which came in with the images as I imported them (such as images that came with exercise files from books and online training). Those ones seem particularly difficult to get rid of but I have no need of them and I doubt they are located anywhere else in my system. Anyway, this explanation is probably only adding to the confusion so maybe let me put things this way:  I have a folder of files that have keywords assigned to each image, some of which are mine and some of which are not (those in italics). How do I delete all the keywords? I don't want to affect my keywording in my Lightroom Classic program in doing this.

Thanks for responding - appreciate it.

[Justin Other]

I'm new to all this, but I hit this wall within the first day of evaluating Bridge. My solution is as follows:

1. In Bridge and from the Keywords panel, right-click the keyword you want to delete and select Find…
2. The results should be every image in your currently active selected set or folder. Note that as others have written on here, Bridge relies on Spotlight for searching but it also seems to have adverse reactions with Spotlight (in my situation, at least). Make sure you're seeing all the files you expect to see before continuing.
3. Do a Select All on the images.
4. Uncheck the keyword.
5. Wait for Bridge to finish updating the metadata on all those files. (!important)
6. Right-click the keyword again and this time select Delete.

If the keyword Find… fails to return every file you expect to see, you'll have to select them by hand or find another way to group them.

One issue I've found with Bridge is that it can't immediately update IPTC keywords. If you don't allow Bridge enough time to complete the remove keyword task, the delete task will fail and you'll see some of your files still have the keyword attached. I imagine this software bug was discovered years ago, but apparently nobody thinks it's very important.

The keyword un/check process is rather slow. I'm on a Mac Studio with files on an SSD and to update 150 images that are each under 1 MB takes almost two minutes. I can only imagine if I wanted to update all 3000 of my files at once. Blargh.

[Lumigraphics]

Yes you have to be patient. You are writing to every one of those files so it takes time.

[Lumigraphics]

Keywords in italics are in the files you are currently viewing. They are not persistent (stored in bridge for re-use.)

[Lumigraphics]

Oh and finally, Lightroom and Bridge have a conflict where they step on each other's keywords. I don't recommend using them together.

[Stephen Marsh]

It would perhaps be helpful if you posted screenshots to illustrate.

https://helpx.adobe.com/au/bridge/using/keywords-adobe-bridge.html#remove_keywords_from_a_file

[Guest]

I can post a screenie of the keyword panel, although I'm not sure what it will show. I need to head out for a bit so I'll get that up by mid afternoon EDT if that's ok. Thanks Stephen. Much appreciated.

[Guest]

I tried to attach a video but it says I don't have permission to do that. So, enclosed is a screen shot. I deselected the "aged" keyword from a single image. About 10 seconds after I did, it rechecked itself. I was still focused on the same image. I repeated this process 3 times and each time it rechecked the box on it's own. This is what's confusing me. Many thanks again. I do have to go out but will be back in about 4 hours or so (it's now 14:03 GMT). Note this was from an image I imported from a training file so the keywords you see are not mine (the ones above the "Other Keywords" are, but those too seem to exhibit the same behaviour).

 

[Lumigraphics]

Catalina has a bunch of permissions issues. This sounds like you don't have permissions to change those files.

[Guest]

Ah yes, you may well be right. I added Bridge to the appropriate locations and enabled it and in a very quick test, it worked fine. I'll do something more comprehensive tomorrow, but it looks like you hit on the issue. I'll mark your answer as "Correct" if tomorrow works out as hoped. Thank you very much indeed for your input. Much appreciated.

[Guest]

@Lumigraphics - Thanks again for this idea. Unfortunately after doing a more extensive test I've found that adding Bridge to various locations did not make any difference. So it wasn't that (wish it were!). Appreciate the idea very much though.

[Stephen Marsh]

The "aged" keyword is in italics, it is non-persistent and is found under "Other Keywords".

See if any of the following info from the link in my previous post help:

"Note: Temporary keywords, such as keywords that you get from other users, appear in italics in the Keywords panel. To make temporary keywords permanent in Adobe Bridge, right-click (Windows) or Ctrl-click (Mac OS) the keyword and choose Make Persistent from the context menu."

and

"To remove a check mark forcibly, Alt-click (Windows) or Option-click (Mac OS) the keyword box. This method is especially useful when you select multiple files to which the keyword was applied only to some, causing a hyphen to appear in the keyword box. To forcibly remove a check mark from a keyword and its parents, press Alt+Shift (Windows) or Option+Shift (Mac OS) and click the keyword box."

and

"Tip: To lock a file so that keywords can’t accidentally be removed, right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Mac OS) the file in the Content panel and choose Lock Item. When an item is locked, you cannot add or remove keywords, edit metadata, or apply labels or ratings."

[Guest]

Good morning (here at least 🙂 ), and thanks for this. Appreciate you putting this in here. On the first option, yes I had tried that before posting here (as noted in my original post) to no avail. On the second option, I just tried that and that too didn't work. I brought in a couple of images I had keyworded in Lightroom to a test folder and attempted to remove those (they were keyworded by me and were not in italics) and that too didn't work. However when I added a couple of keywords from within Bridge itself, those I were able to remove. It almost seems in my case like if the keywords were not inserted by Bridge, then Bridge won't remove them. I also noted that the keyword set (under "Other Keywords"), which I had removed in LRC the day before, were all still there (see down for that explanation), and yet so were the new keywords I made in LRC also yesterday. So Bridge is picking up on keywords I'm creating elsewhere in the system as well as maintaining the keywords I made in it. Now likely the keywords in most of the images I've imported are baked in as they are mostly all jpegs so that may be where those are coming from (a guess on my part). 

So what I did yesterday (as I got more and more frustrated) was I moved all the images (minus the xmp's where applicable) to new folders and created a Lightroom catalogue, figuring I'd go that route instead of Bridge. Naturally the jpeg's retained all the keywords I've been trying to eliminate in Bridge. However, in LR I was able to select all the images at once and then delete all the keywords associated with them in the process, then delete the remainder from the Keyword List that weren't assigned. That worked just fine, and just like I expected Bridge would work. None of them suddenly reappeared. I then went and made a new keyword list and started applying them to photographs. This went without a hitch, so I'm even more perplexed as to why Bridge is exhibiting the behavour it is when how the operation is described in Bridge seems to work flawlessly in LR Classic and yet not in Bridge. Obviously there is something I'm missing here. As mentioned elsewhere, I did add the permissions entries but that seems to have had no effect. I think it actually did have all the permissions it required. By the by, I asked a friend of mine to try out the same things on his machine (he as a similar, but not identical setup) and he said he was running into the same problem for the most part, although he noted that he could select and deselect a keyword, but couldn't delete italicised keywords.

Anyway, unless you can see something I've missed, or have other ideas to try, I may just give up on Bridge (this isn't the only issue I have with it unfortunately) and go with LRC for my images and use Finder for my .ai files. Really appreciate your assistance. If you can think of anything else I can try, I'm all ears... err eyes 😉 . Thanks again.

[Guest · Accepted solution]

Ok, I think I found the key in all this so I thought I'd post it here in case anyone else runs into this. In the files I've been referring to, they keywords are being stored in the IPTC field of the image. It would appear (and I have yet to fully test this) that if you delete those keywords from within LR Classic, LR Classic "kind of" filters them out so you don't see them. Now I'm a little confused about that because when I look at the IPTC fields in LRC, I don't see any fields that say Keywords, so perhaps the Keyword Pane in LRC is the IPTC field for the file. However, that doesn't explain why after deleting the keywords in LRC yesterday, then copying that image over to a test folder and opening it in Bridge today, there is still has an IPTC Keywords field and it's populated with the keywords that I had deleted in LRC yesterday. Obviously there's a lot going on there that is escaping me. Nevertheless what is happening is that I was deleting them (or trying to) from Bridge's keyword set, but as I did so, Bridge would refresh the image and in the process, re-read in the IPTC Keyword field and "pop" - there they would be again. So while I'm still confused (a fairly steady-state situation for me these days 😉 ), I do think I've stumbled on to the reason why the things I'm seeing are happening. It is a bit odd that when Bridge displays the keywords in it's keyword pane, why you can't adjust the IPTC keywords from there; and perhaps this is how it's supposed to work, but for some reason, isn't. There is still more to discover in this, and I'll keep at it but for this thread's purpose, if anyone is having troubles with keywords in Bridge, I would recommend going to the IPTC Core section, selecting the keywords in the Keywords field and deleting them from there. Then you can go back to the Bridge Keyword Pane and proceed as you normally would. By the by, I subsequently added a keyword a few keywords to 2 of the files I was having issues with (after first clearing out the IPTC>Keywords field manually) and those did populate the IPTC>Keywords field as expected. I then cleared them from within the Bridge Keywords Pane and they did clear as expected. The mystery remains as to why I haven't been able to clear (or easily clear) the IPTC>Keywords that came with the file via the Bridge Keyword Pane, but at least this offers an explanation as to how to clear it if you're running into this issue yourself. The investigation continues, but this does resolve this problem, if not fully.

Thanks again for the help Lumigraphics & Stephen. Much appreciated.

EDIT - Addendum:  I discovered that there was one folder I had not eliminated the keywords from and voila, I suddenly had a keyword list as long as your arm again. Fortunately it only took a minute to delete the unwanted keywords, but unfortunately it left a bunch of left-over keywords in the keyword list again that I will only be able to delete one at a time as they are not in any metadata field (obviously). They weren't assigned to any photos so it was easy to delete them, but nevertheless it was a very time consuming process. This tells me Bridge does not have a dedicated keyword list and everything just goes into (and comes out of) the IPTC Core>Keywords field. It also tells me that while I might have a nice, compact list for the images I do need to track, that list will suddenly grow to "x" proportions as soon as I click on an image outside of these folders and which may have keywords embedded themselves. That just doesn't work for me and thus the keywording setup in Bridge really isn't of much use unless you have a completely unified setup, such as a single stock listing with nothing else from other sources. Unfortunately for me, I also have digital art, Illustrator files, etc., etc. Those need a totally different set of keywords and since Lightroom will only read pixel based files, I have to use something else to deal with those files. I think Finder will fill that role for me quite nicely. Anyway, hopefully this thread is of use to others who may be experiencing similar frustrations. Thanks again to responders. I appreciate your time.

[annatribe]

Glenn!! Thank you so much for pursuing and posting this.  A while after the fact but this advise has just ended the complete frustration I was having withthe same problem as you.  All is so much better now.

Cheers!

[Lumigraphics]

There are (at least) FOUR places that keywords can be stored in a file. IPTC, dc:subject, lr:hierarchicalKeywords, and Microsoft keywords. There is a bug in Photoshop and Bridge File Info panel where dc:subject and lr can get out of sync. I do NOT recommend using Bridge and Lightroom together if you rely on keywords, as they will step on each other and cause all sorts of problems.