Lightroom Classic 8.4: Moves parts of keyword hierarchy - reproducible

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I realized that complete branches of my keyword hierarchy disappeared from the catalogue.

I have following keyword hierarchy used for people (for face recognition)

A
- [Names starting with A]
B
- Bill Miller
- Bjorn Smith
- ...
C
- [Names starting with C]
...

STEPS to reproduce

1.I have a person identified by face recognition as "Bill Miller"
2. By accident, I assign the keyword "B" instead "Bill Miller"
3. The keyword "B" (which is the root note for all names starting with "B") does not have any other photos assigned
4. I now realized my mistake and change the "B" assignment into "Bill Miller" 
5. ERROR: Lightroom now realizes, the "B" has not have anymore photos assigned the deletes "B" INCLUDING all keyword underneath B
6. As a result, all my keyword underneath "B" (which are in fact all people starting with "B") are deleted!

That is a very serious bug since it can (and did for my) destroy a lot of work and you do not realized that the keywords underneath "B" disappeared.

[johnrellis]

That sounds bad. Please copy/paste the first ten lines from Help > System Info so we know precisely which version of LR and OS you're running.  

[tmickow]

I can't replicate that behavior in Win10 / Lr Classic 8.4.  Changing "B" to "Bill Miller" behaves normally and the hierarchy of keywords all remain intact.

Can you give a more detailed explanation of the exact steps you're taking in your step 4 above?

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Many thanks for the quick reply. Here the system information:

Lightroom Classic version: 8.4 [ 201908011719-03751b60 ]
License: Creative Cloud
Language setting: en
Operating system: Windows 10 - Business Edition
Version: 10.0.18362
Application architecture: x64
System architecture: x64
Logical processor count: 16
Processor speed: 3,3 GHz
Built-in memory: 32716,2 MB

I just tried again and can clearly reproduce it in my existing catalogue. That is indeed a very large catalogue. I will try to reproduce it with a fresh catalogue.

[johnrellis]

If you can't reproduce it in a new catalog, save away a copy of your existing catalog (just the .lrcat file) in case Adobe developers want to examine it.

[johnrellis]

A a full-resolution screen recording showing the exact steps you're taking could also help: 
https://betanews.com/2019/01/14/windows-10-screen-recorder-ultility/

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I also can reproduce it with a new catalogue - try the following.

1. Take two photos of people.
2. Assign Keyword "Person 1" to the face on photo 1
3. Assign Keyword "Person 2" to the face on photo 2
4. Create a keyword "P" and
5. Move the keyword "Person 1" underneath "P" in the keyword hierarchy
6. Move the keyword "Person 2" underneath "P" in the keyword hierarchy
7. The assign "Person 1" to "P". (does not make sense but can happend by accident)
8. The revert "P" to "Person 1" 
[Do steps 5. / 6. by typing the keyword in the fly out box of the person's face in the loupe view]
9. ERROR the keyword of "Person 2" is deleted even though the photo was not touched.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Hello John, I created a screen cam using the above mentioned tool. In the last step you can see, that a keyword disappears. I used a fresh catalogue with only two photos.

https://1drv.ms/v/s!AkVIboyOt6DigP72PjK7PPMVWKGGSE4?e=SvT9Qk

Kindly note that the above mentioned tools seems to have some limitation since it does not capature Win32 Dialogs, so the creating dialog for new keywords is not shown in the video.

[tmickow]

Yep, I can definitely replicate it now using your steps and a few variations of my own.  I missed it before because the my parent keyword had more than one image tagged.  Once I had only one image tagged in the parent node, changing the tag wiped out the entire hierarchy.  That's not good!

If you unassign by using the checkbox next to the keyword first and then update the face rectangle, it appears to work as expected.  I'll have to play around a little more, but that may be a workaround for now.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Thanks Tom. In fact that happend for me for quite a lot keywords and I did not realized it. Old backups do not helps since I continuously worked on my catalogue.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Tom, actually that workaround work okay but there is still the risk that a lot of keywords get lost, so I feel Adobe needs to fix that. I think that should be a easy fix, just need to double-check if a keyword not only has no assigned photos but also is not root of a hierarchy before removing it.

[Mayuri_Jain]

Hi,

Thanks for reporting the issue. We are able to replicate the issue in earlier versions also . We have logged a bug for the same. We will discuss and prioritise the issue. We will keep you posted.

Thanks
Mayuri

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Hello Mayuri,

many thanks for taking care of this.

I just want to point out: even though you might consider that as an edge case, it can really destroy a lot of work. I have to re-tag thousands of photos manually now. The worse is that you do not realized that bug right away, so just reverting to a former backup does not work since I continued working on my catalogue in the meantime...

Cheers Frank