Keyword metadata stored in Adobe Bridge is critical to many users digital asset management workflows. Therefore it is surprising how common it is for Bridge users to not backup their keyword database and to have no easy way to recover their keyword metadata if this information is lost.
On the Mac OS, the location of the Adobe Bridge Keywords.xml will be similar to:
/Users/loggedinusername/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Bridge CC 2015/Adobe Bridge Keywords.xml Mac users should simply replace “loggedinusername” and “Bridge CC 2015” with the appropriate user name and version of Bridge.
On MS Windows, the path to the Adobe Bridge Keywords.xml will be similar to:
C:\Users\Loggedinusername\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Bridge CC 2015\Adobe Bridge Keywords.xml
MS Windows users should replace the “Loggedinusername” and “Bridge CC 2015” with the appropriate user name and version of Bridge. It should be noted that the AppData directory may be a hidden folder for some users.
An automated back-up can be created on the Mac OS using Apple Automator, while on MS Windows an xcopy or robocopy command can be placed into a batch script and regularly run by a scheduled task.
Sadly a common question for many users that have lost their Adobe Bridge Keywords.xml file is:
“How can I easily restore the contents of the Adobe Bridge Keywords.xml file if I don’t have a backup”?
Rather than manually rebuilding the database, my solution is to download and install the venerable ExifTool command line interface program from Phil Harvey. Despite it’s name, ExifTool is capable of handling many forms of metadata – including EXIF, IPTC, XMP, GPS and ICC.
Once ExifTool is installed, a simple command can create a tab delimited text file of all of the embedded keyword metadata found in the source images:
exiftool -r -T -subject '/Users/loggedinusername/Pictures/' > '/Users/loggedinusername/Desktop/exiftool-keyword-dump.txt'
This command will recursively scan all subfolders and files within the “Pictures” folder of the current logged in user and create a tab delimited text file on the user’s Desktop containing the keyword metadata found in each image. The previous command line code is from the Mac, on Windows simply change the single straight quote/foot mark ' to straight double quote/inch marks " with the correct platform specific path to the top level folder.
Once the tab delimited text file has been created, open Adobe Bridge and go to the “Keywords Panel” and then use the panel’s menu to Import the plain text file. Bridge will then import and populate the keywords as “persistent” keywords. It will take a little more work to create “Sub Keywords”, either indenting the sub keywords with a tab character in the plain text file under the main keyword – or manually using the Bridge GUI to categorise the “parent” and “child” keywords. Note: There is no need to create an XML file, Bridge will create the correct XML data when importing the plain text file (this is also the key for sharing keywords between Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Bridge, as both applications use different XML structures for their native keywords database).
Addendum: It is a fairly quick task to re-work the XML file into a plain text version that can be imported through the Keywords panel. Simply use a standard find/replace function, or even better – a regular expression based find/replace command to search for and remove or replace the unwanted characters. TextWrangler on the Mac OS or Notepad++ on Win OS offer regular expression based searches. Example regular expressions include:
Find: <.+?"|".+?>|<\/.+>|<.+>> Replace: Or perhaps another regex for the same result, this time using a capture group reference in the replace… Find: (?:<\/set>)|(?:<.+?")(.+?)(?:".+>)|(?:<\/keywords>) Replace: $1 To remove the extra leading tab character on each line, perform a regex search for a single tab at the start of a line: Find: ^\t Replace: | 
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