P: (Windows) Panel is limited to 1600 items (folders, keywords, etc)

Report · Apr 16, 2015

Lightroom bug - hit a folder limit and unable to select the newly imported folder.452497 photographs across many drives in one catalog.The S drive has 214341 photos. It's the largest drive and so had many more folders than the previous drives.S:\Master Photos\ contains ~1633 folders. I know that's a lot but that is how her filing system was started. Those are the sequential numbers from 2220 - 3853 but there may be a sub folder or two or deleted folder in there so that's why the number is ~ approximate.Folders are labeled "sequential number"-"date" so 3853-20150316Adding one more folder caused Lightroom 4 to not allow the last folder to be clicked on and not show any images. The T:\ drive (offline, collapsed and below the S:\ drive) was collapsed and the label was overlaid on top of the "Collections" section label. Updated to latest version of Lightroom 5 via her new cloud account, had it rebuild the catalog and the same problem occurred.Created a sub folder S:\Master Photos\2012 and moved 15 of the folders into that folder. The 2012 folder was expanded so the list was actually one row larger and the last good folder wouldn't open. I collapsed the 2012 folder and now all the bottom folders were accessible.It appears there is an object limitation or a fixed array or something that is causing the folder list to become finite. She said a similar thing happens on her keyword list until she collapses some of the groups but I didn't check that out.

Report · Dec 23, 2017

I had issues reorganizing my keyword list hierarchically as suggested, as LR (7.1 on Win 10) froze on every second move. Asking for help I was pointed to this thread. Seems pretty similar, possibly related.
As IT pro I got curious and dug into the SQLite DB (which is the catalog). I found some redundancy in the tables and something that worries me: the ids for all keywords along a path down hierarchy to any keyword are stored with this keyword as a string. This could be a potential issue with deeply nested hierarchies.
Currently I am at 2157 keywords on my list with 1841 being on the top-level. Bit by bit I manage to get more structure into it and bring LR back to life. Not really happy.
Henrik Zawischa

Report · Mar 23, 2018

I have a very strongly structured keyword hierarchy of over 33,000 keywords (yes, I know!) and I'm getting the screen blanking issue when I enter a keyword starting with "S".

I haven't really had any other issues, but this screen blanking issue is a real pain in the backside.

Is there any plan to fix this issue?

Report · Mar 23, 2018

Do you mean when you enter a keyword starting with "S" in the Keywording panel?

Report · Mar 23, 2018

Hi Stephan,

Please share your catalog with us. You can upload and share me the link. I will try to reproduce this issue.
Your system info please.

-Kanheiya

Report · Jun 08, 2018

I recently found that on entering the letter "s" in the Keyword Tags box, the screen would blank and then flash. Pressing Esc or any other letter would bring it back.

Having carried out some tests, I have found that this behaviour occurs once there are more than about 1,020 keywords which start with the same letter.

Having counted initial letters of keywords in Excel, I found I had 1,088 beginning with "s". As a test, I increased the number of keywords commencing with the next most frequent character, which happened to be "c". As the number beginning with "c" approached 1,020, the drop down text of suggested keywords (typing "c" in the Keyword Tags box) began to blur, and once it reached 1,020 (approximately), the same screen blanking behaviour as I had on typing "s" occurred. Removing a couple of the "c" keywords stopped the blanking behaviour, adding a couple to replace them started it again.

There seems to be a clear bug which, at least on my Windows 10 system with plenty of RAM, causes Lightroom to choke when searching its database if it contains more than about 1,020 keywords which begin with the same letter being searched.

Report · Jun 08, 2018

Windows LR has a long-standing bug that Adobe has decided not to fix -- it chokes when you get more than about 1500 keywords. The only workaround is to introduce hierarchy (or more hierarchy) into your keywords and keep most of the hierarchy collapsed in the Keyword List panel.

Report · Jun 08, 2018

Thanks for the reply.

My keywords are already in a hierarchy, which goes some 6 or 7 levels deep in places, maybe even more in a few instances. It has a dozen or so top level category headings to which the list is collapsed most of the time because any other view would be hopelessly unwieldy. It sounds as if I have been lucky that it has worked for as long as it has, because I reckon I have about 3,300 keywords (plus synonyms which would approximately triple the count).

If Adobe is not going to address this issue, I guess it is going to have to be goodbye Lightroom. There is little point to having a database which is incapable of growing as your library of images expands. Maybe Adobe sees the cataloguing and keywording functions as being for amateurs or small-time users and accepts that those with larger portfolios will look elsewhere, but with the proliferation of digital photography I would imagine that more and more people are going to come up against these limits.

It is disappointing that long standing limitations in the keywording functions generally have not received attention for years. This seems to be another, of which I was not previously aware.

Report · Jun 09, 2018

Note that the bug only strikes when you have more than about 1500 keywords currently displayed. So by keeping the hierarchy collapsed, you won't encounter the bug. Rather than explicitly expanding the hierarchy, you can use the Search box in the Keyword List panel to get to the keywords you're interested in. And I quite agree -- painful and annoying.

Report · Jun 24, 2018

We supply a patient photographing system and use Lightroom as the DAM. The majority of our clients on Windows hit the list limit for folders as each tethered session creates a new folder. We have a system for splitting into hierarchy through a plugin but it is inconvenient and it would be great if Adobe could fix this.

Report · Jun 25, 2018

Every Windows application with large scrolling lists has to cope with the maximum size that Windows imposes on low-level windows (32K pixels) by repainting the windows as necessary. Most applications do that by using commonly available libraries of user-interface controls that do the work for them.

But Adobe took a shortcut when they implemented LR Windows, choosing to implement their own controls but failing to complete the work. They did it for Library grid view but not Folders, Collections, Keyword List, and other panels. And they've never owned up to taking that shortcut. See here for details:
https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/bug-that-causes-collections-and-publish-servi...

Report · Nov 17, 2018

LR CC 8.0
There is a problem moving keywords from one hierarchy level to another using the mouse (drag & drop).

Steps to reproduce (in my case):

- 2000 items in the root of the keyword list
- OK: Moving one item (e.g. number 385) under another item to generate a new hierarchy level.
- Not OK: Moving one item (e.g. number 1885) under another item to generate a new hierarchy level or just moving it to another level. LR works some time and then all items in the keyword list are marked up to the item number 1885.

This was tested on two different Windows 10 PCs, with a "work" catalog and with complete new catalog. On all test scenarios the tests were OK from item 1 to 1649. With number 1650 (exactly) and higher all tests went wrong.

Report · Nov 17, 2018

I, as well as others, can confirm that this issue does not occur under the Mac OS—in any version going back to 2014.

It's strictly a Bill Gates bug.

Report · Nov 17, 2018

LR also chokes when there are more than about 1500 folders in the Folders panel or 1500 collections in the Collections panel. The original sin here was Adobe's.

Every Windows application with large scrolling lists has to cope with the maximum size that Windows imposes on low-level windows (32K pixels) by repainting the windows as necessary. Most applications do that by using commonly available libraries of user-interface controls that do the work for them.

But Adobe took a shortcut when they implemented LR Windows, choosing to implement their own controls but failing to complete the work. They did it for Library grid view but not Folders, Collections, Keyword List, and other panels. And they've never owned up to taking that shortcut. See here for details:
https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/bug-that-causes-collections-and-publish-servi...

Report · Nov 18, 2018

I've run into something a few times with Lightroom (both older versions and now the latest version, Lightroom Classic CC 8.0) in which at times the folder list in the Library module cuts off and does not display the bottom folders. When that happens, the scroll bar is present but the folder list ends prematurely, often with dozens of folders missing at the bottom. That complicates things because my naming convention for photo shoots involves folder names that start with the date, so my latest shoots are always at the bottom. The solution has been to restart Lightroom -- and if that doesn't work, to reboot the computer. Eventually the folder view is complete again... until the next time.

I thought the issue might be an odd quirk localized to my computer but it happened again today as I'm migrating to a brand new computer. Brand new install of Lightroom Classic 8.0 on a clean install of Windows 10 Pro, with my catalog transferred over. I fired up Lightroom and right off the bat the folder view was cut off with a few dozen folders missing from the bottom of the list. I restarted Lightroom several times, rebooted the computer several times, but the missing folders remained missing.

Over the last few months I developed a hunch that this issue is related to screen resolutions (I have a 4K laptop with two larger external monitors) so I tried changing the screen resolutions and scaling settings in Windows and... after trying several options I got the folder list to be complete again.

It seems to me that there's a bug in Lightroom that doesn't always account for resolution and scaling settings. Anyone else run into this problem? I know I can filter the folder view for a specific folder name (which I didn't think to try when folders were missing), but I'm hoping this bug gets identified and resolved.

Report · Nov 18, 2018

The workaround to this long-standing bug is to introduce more hierarchy into your folder structure and keep most of the parent folders collapsed.

The underlying limitation is on the size of the low-level operating system window, so as you increase the actual font size, fewer lines of text can fit into the window.

Report · Nov 18, 2018

If that's the case, then why does it work most of the time? This does not appear to be a hard limit. Like I mentioned in my original post, after messing with resolution and scaling the folders are back.

Report · Nov 18, 2018

You could be close to the maximum. The experience with keywords is that the behavior gets flaky and unreliable "near" the maximum. If you doubled the number of folders, you'd always encounter the problem.

Report · Mar 28, 2019

The problem is that even when you DO get a hierarchy going, if you didn't do it from the very beginning there are still a ton of unsorted keywords which you can't get into the hierarchy because they won't drag/drop.
Has anyone worked around this by exporting the list to Excel and moving stuff around in there? It seems like it would be doable but insanely tedious -- anybody have any tips/shortcuts?

Report · Mar 28, 2019

Unfortunately, you can't use Metadata > Export Keywords and Import Keywords to rearrange your hierarchy without losing all the existing assignments of the keywords to photos.

But here's a trick for introducing hierarchy into a very large flat list: Type the name of the keyword you want to move and the name of the new parent keyword into the Keyword List panel's search box. That will show just those keywords containing one of the words.

For example, to move the top-level keyword "Jacqueline's Birthday" under the parent keyword Events > Birthdays, I could enter "Birthdays Jacqueline" into the search box and get this:

Now it's straightforward to drag "Jacqueline's Birthday" onto Events > Birthdays.

Report · Mar 29, 2019

THANK YOU! That is BRILLIANT!!!

Report · Aug 09, 2019

I was just bitten by this bug and am disappointed that LR Classic has a problem with a modest number of keywords. I was able to use John's great suggestions to collapse some of my hierarchy so that I could resume moving keywords. I have a well-developed hierarchy. Now I am thinking that even with collapsing, this bug may return when my taxonomy grows beyond a certain point. Is there any thought to fixing this limitation or, more likely since I think Classic (I have LR 5.7 on Windows) isn't being maintained, probably not? I teach LR and had liked to always have the latest version, but once LR moved to a subscription model, I balked. Maybe it's time to just subscribe. Thanks, John, for the workaround!

Report · Aug 09, 2019

To clarify: There are two versions of subscription LR, Lightroom Classic, the latest version of the traditional desktop-focused version (now at version 8), and just plain Lightroom, the "new" cloud-focused version with far fewer features but available on mobile devices. See here for the differences:
https://www.lightroomqueen.com/lightroom-cc-vs-classic-features/

(Thank Adobe marketers for the perspicuous naming.)

Lightroom Classic is still being maintained, and Adobe has fixed many bugs reported here in the last year or so, seemingly more than the previous several years before the "Classic" label was applied.

Unfortunately, this too-many-keywords bug is still present in LR Classic 8.3.1. In my opinion, it's not likely to be ever fixed, since it's the result of shortcuts Adobe took in the early development of LR on Windows, and fixing it would take a significant amount of effort and may require specialized skills that the current engineering team lacks:
https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/bug-that-causes-collections-and-publish-servi...

I don't know if the too-many-keywords bug occurs in cloud-focused Lightroom. It wouldn't surprise me if it does, since I think it may share the same underlying code base for implementing the Mac and Windows user interfaces.

Report · Dec 07, 2019

Mine only goes to the "n"s. See from above they're blaming windows. Seems if you wrote some code that doesn't work on the target OS, you need write new code that does work. Much as I love LR, ya gotta wonder at the abilities of some of the developers - or at the project managers for decisions that make the development team seem culpable for functional failures. If a feature is useful enough and in demand enough, not making sure it's working properly is inexcusable. Glad the LR team doesn't work on airplanes, or life support systems, or nuclear missile guidance systems...

Report · Dec 07, 2019

In principle, you are right, but it's just hot air - this is unlikely to be fixed. So gradually introduce some hierarchy into your keyword list, learn to use the filter box (see John Ellis's tip above), and move on.

Report · Jan 13, 2020

Is there a limit on the number of keywords allowed? In Library mode I cannot scroll down to the end of the alphabet.

P: (Windows) Panel is limited to 1600 items (folders, keywords, etc)

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