recover bridge keywords

[peregrineguy]

sometime in the last few months I lost my personal keywords, but I dont recall the specific timing.  It may have been a result of upgrading my OX to Catalina around that time.  Earlier, I had switched over to Bridge 2021.  I am not a Lightroom user.  I upgraded to a much older file of keywords I had saved maybe a year ago, but that is inadequate.  I would like to use Time Machine to obtain and "install" a keyword file/list from the end of last year. But WHERE IS IT and how do I do that?  OS and apps are up-to-date.

If I go to library-app support-adobe-adobe bridge 2021 (or 2020) I do not see any thing like the keyword list.

[Deepak5FFC · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I am from Adobe Bridge Team.

The path that you mentioned is the correct path: 

/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Bridge 2021/Adobe Bridge Keywords.xml

This is where it is supposed to be. May be Time Machine skipped backing up this file/folder?

Regards,

Deepak

[KokoBlue]

Does not help. File is NOT there!

I did not change or update anything.

They were there yesterday... they are gone today! 

Really pissed off!

[Stephen_A_Marsh]

You can view images with embedded keywords and make them persistent. There are scripts to save keywords from files to text file for import and there are some options: 

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

[peregrineguy]

On more than one occasion large numbers of my keywords have been lost and it just happened again.  My best guess is that when I deleted the prior version of PS and bridge (I do not use LR) all of the keywords therein, but not used in the current versions, were not carried forward.  How do I get them back and prevent this happening again?  I have put weeks of effort into ID’ ing pictures via keywords and now may not recall, for example, what kind of a bird I photographed.  Can I use Time Machine to extract—multiple—keyword files and then combine them all into one, active file.

This is really devastating.

[peregrineguy]

My apologies...  Looks like the file is "complete" except that i was mistaken in having applied some keywording that should have been there, but wasnt.

BTW, to get to the keywords file one has to hold the Option key and then click on Go in top menu and then select library.