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

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

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.

[John R Ellis]

If there are more than the maximum number of keywords displayed in the Keyword List panel, then drag-and-drop will behave very inconsistently, in the way that David Larson was observing.

If you observe drag-and-drop behaving inconsistently or not working at all with less than the maximum number of keywords currently visible in the Keyword List panel, then I think that's a separate bug. I don't recall seeing any bug reports about that, so please file a bug report with as much detail as you can provide.

[JLobert]

Correct, it is a separate bug and it is related to the (very persistent across many versions of) LR behavior that the software becomes unresponsive when its memory footprint gets too large. Depending on how much system RAM you have, it can be as little as 6 GB, but I usually find it behaving erratically around 10 GB+ (I have 64 GB RAM and a dedicated swap disk).

[John R Ellis]

Please file a bug report about that behavior. I don't think there are any previous bug reports about this in this forum.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I am another user who has hit this limit within the past few months, and only just been made aware of the underlying cause. It seems to me that reaching ~1500 folders in a single parent folder is very likely, given that one of the import options is "organize by date" with a date based folder naming convention. In my case this was after around 8 years, with around 1600 automatically named import folders (\pictures\import\yyyy-mm-dd). Of course it's possible to work around the problem by rearranging the folder hierarchy so that import folders are (for example) in a year based parent folder, but that's a manual process, not a standard import naming convention.

[FrostyOfTheNorth]

I had to add a year-based parent folder to solve the problem.  It was a painful and otherwise unnecessary process.   I wish Adobe would have addressed these issues instead.  I don't know if they have since I posted about about.

[ronbyram]

I am in Keyword List and Trying to Cleanup/Move/Reorg my numerous Keywords.  I have created New Names (Ie. Person / Place/Things) and will move the keyword to them. But when I start at top I can move Items into the Tree. But as I scroll down towards the Keywords  starting O-Z and Try to move them, I get a Vertical then white bar. And I can not move the Keyword.  I know this must mean I have a keyword issue. But How to I identify and correct? 

[John R Ellis]

Are you on Windows?  Windows LR has a longstanding bug that silently allows at most about 1500 keywords to be displayed at a time (or less, depending on your font and display settings).  The workaround is to introduce hierarchical keywords and keep most of the parent keywords collapsed, so fewer than 1500 keywords are displayed at any one time.

[ronbyram]

I am using windows 10. ANd I am trying to do the Hierarchical thing. Guess I need to bust up the list more.

[John R Ellis]

A tip for working with large numbers of keywords: In the Filter Keywords box, type one or more words.  LR will filter the keyword list to just those containing the words you've typed. 

So, for example, type the keyword you want to move and the parent keyword you want to move it under, and it is then much easier to drag-and-drop (and avoid the 1500-keyword bug).

[John R Ellis]

Why conversations get merged:

https://feedback.photoshop.com/conversations/lightroom-classic/lightroom-auto-import-to-folders-orga... 

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I have a nice keyword hierarchy with more then 10 000 items (including animals and birds). Lightroom Classic works nicely with these keywords except when I use the search input above the keyword list.

When entering 2 characters (and waiting a little bit too long before entering a third character), Lightroom starts filtering and this takes almost 2 minutes while  Lightroom hangs. I have a very fast PC (AMD Ryzen 7 + 32Gb RAM).

I'm a software developer so I understand why this can take so long but I do not understand why Lightroom starts searching for 2 characters while I'm typing. There is an easy fix for this easy: do not search for 2 characters while typing if the keyword hierarchy is large. Just wait until user presses enter, leaves the input field, or clicks a (new) search button. After 3 characters the filtering looks fast enough.

I hope this can be solved in a next version because this is slowing down my workflow

[John R Ellis]

I think this is another symptom of a longstanding bug, in which Windows LR chokes when it tries to display more than about 1500 - 3000 keywords in the Keyword List panel:

https://feedback.photoshop.com/conversations/lightroom-classic/lightroom-classic-chokes-on-large-key... 

I have a test keyword list of 28K hierarchical keywords, organized under about 50 top-level keywords.

On Mac, LR is a little sluggish when I type "e" -- it takes about 15 seconds to display the 17K matching keywords.  When I type "et", it takes just about a second to display the 1K matching keywords.

But on Windows, I observe the bad behavior. If I type "e", it takes about 80 seconds to display the matching keywords and unfreeze, and it only displays the first 2800 or so of the 17K matching keywords. If I type "et", it takes about a second to display the 1K matching keywords. If I type "x", it takes about a second to display the 560 matching keywords.

This points the finger at Windows LR limitation on the number of keywords it can display in the panels.

- Which two letters are you typing?  After LR finally shows the filtered list, about how many keywords are displayed?  You can quickly estimate that by counting how many lines are shown in the Keyword List panel, and then clicking at the bottom of the scroll bar to scroll by complete screenfuls.

- Try typing "xz" quickly.  How long does it take?

I think it's very unlikely Adobe is ever going to fix the underlying bug (details on request).

[John R Ellis]

Why conversations get merged:

https://feedback.photoshop.com/conversations/lightroom-classic/lightroom-auto-import-to-folders-orga... 

[Tordan58]

Description

I use keywords extensively and have created what has now become a long list of keywords; to be precise, 3294 as of today, and still growing. The issue I have is that the list of keywords that are displayed in the right pane in LR is not complete/truncated; Lightroom displays the first 2234 keywords only (in alphabetical order) and there is no way to scroll beyond that.  The count 2234 seems fixed; I tested by deleting or adding keywords before keyword #2234 and the count of visible keywords remains 2234. The exact counts were obtained by exporting the list and counting the lines.

Keywords beyond #2234 are possible to use to a limited extent only. They are still recognized e.g. auto-complete works when tagging photos/entering keywords, however, it's quite annoying as I cannot search/filter pictures tagged with a specific keyword beyond #2234. 

I use LR Classic version 10.3 on a desktop running Windows 10.

I think the issue was introduced when I upgraded from version 9. I cannot remember running across this issue when using version 9.

I have attached two screenshots depicting the issue:

- Keyword pane in LR

- Exported list of keywords

Kindly let me know how to remedy this issue,

Tord Andreasson

[JohanElzenga]

This is a known issue with Windows. I'm not a Windows user myself, but I believe this can be fixed by creating keyword hierarchies, so you can collapse and expand parts of the list (which would be my advise even if that bug did not exist). Create a (non-exporting if you like) 'Parent keyword' (or use an existing keyword as parent) and drag & drop other keywords on to this parent. Search for the bug report at https://feedback.photoshop.com for more information.

[Tordan58]

Hi Johan,

Thank you for the suggestion on how to work around the issue.

Would the limitation of 2234 keywords still be there? 

Best Wishes,

Tord Andreasson

[@MNiessenPhoto]

Hi Tord,

I've never bothered to try to count them myself 😉 but having tens of thousands of keywords (organized in hierarchy) I can confirm that scrolling is still limited beyond a certain point.

When a few of the keywords (containing a lot of sub-keywords) are expanded, the list just cuts off somewhere, and even the metadata panel that should be below it is hidden and therefore completely inaccessible. When that happens, I can either collapse some keywords (or the full Keyword panel itself) or filter keywords to reduce the list size. Only then is the Metadata panel visible again.

Definitely an issue, though not a big one for me.

Michael

_____________

Michael Niessen - Photographer, photo-editor, educator ([moderator deleted the URL from the signature. Kindly note that URLs in the signature may be considered as spam])

[John R Ellis]

To build on Johan's reply, this has been an outstanding Windows LR bug since the beginning, which Adobe has chosen not to fix:

https://feedback.photoshop.com/conversations/lightroom-classic/lightroom-classic-chokes-on-large-key...

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/lightroom-doesnt-display-all-keywords.html 

The Keywords panel (and the Folders panel, Collections panel, and the Keyword column in the Library Filter bar's Metadata browser) are all limited in size to 2^16-1 = 65,535 pixels high. The maximum number of lines displayed in the panel will vary depending on the Windows and LR display scaling and the font being used.

As Johan mentioned, the workaround is to introduce hierarchy into your keyword list and keep most of the parent keywords collapsed at any one time.  Reorganizing the keyword list is klutzy at best, made more difficult by this bug. Here's a tip to make it easier:

https://feedback.photoshop.com/conversations/lightroom-classic/lightroom-classic-chokes-on-large-key... 

[JohanElzenga]

---

@Tordan58 wrote:

Would the limitation of 2234 keywords still be there? 

Best Wishes,

Tord Andreasson

---

No, the limitation is 2234 lines in the panel, not 2234 keywords. So by creating a hierarchy that you can collapse, your limitation would be around 1000 parent keywords (you need room to expand a parent keyword), that can each contain again about 1000 subkeywords (which can have child keywords as well). That means that the total number of keywords would still not be infinite, but at least over one million.

[Tordan58]

Johan, John, Micael,

Many thanks for sharing your knowledge of this bug and how to work around it. In my case that the list of keywords is basically flat as most of them are names of species. I guess I will have to find out a clever and future-proof way how to organize them using artificial groups... hmm...

Best wishes,

Tord

[John R Ellis]

You could use the first letters of the keywords (A, B, C, ...).  

[@MNiessenPhoto]

"...organize them using artificial groups..."

Or classify them by taxon. Mine is organized by class, family and genus.

That's a lot of work, though, so you might want to look for an existing keywords list.

Michael

_____________

Michael Niessen - Photographer, photo-editor, educator ([moderator deleted the URL from the signature. Kindly note that URLs in the signature may be considered as spam])

[mastix]

As I keyword for Stock I have thousands of keywords and it seems that this brings in many problems to Lightroom and has not been corrected since long time

See this thread:

https://feedback-readonly.photoshop.com/conversations/lightroom-classic/lightroom-classic-chokes-on-... 

In my case I cannot move out any keywords that are inside a parent keyword. it just does not work. I can only erase that keyword but not move it out.

In my case, I wish all the keywords were without any hierarchies. For me it slows me down very much and I have to be always 2 checking if some parent keywords should not be there. I know I can disable export or not include subkeywords but for my workflow all this is a big mess. More so as it seems with this bug I cannot pull the keywords out of parent ones.

My wish would be to give us an option to get rid altogether from this ability that in my case is totally unwanted. A preference checkbox Do NOT use hierarchy would be really welcomed but in the meantime to fix that bug that prevents manually KW by kw destroying any hierarchy that is created. 

[John R Ellis]

"In my case I cannot move out any keywords that are inside a parent keyword. it just does not work. I can only erase that keyword but not move it out."

Type the name of the child keyword in the Filter Keywords box of the Keyword List. This will show only those keywords containing any of the words you entered.  Now there are far fewer than the maximum number of keywords showing, and you should be able drag the child keyword out from underneath its parent.

[mastix]

Thank you. Yes finally I have been able to create parent keyword with the letters of the Alphabet and nest all the keywords that begin with that letter inside. The problem is finally gone now.

It works perfectly  and now I can drag and drop again.

Annoying bug but glad there is a solution.

I wish it was not there altogether and I could just disable the hierarchies option in LR. I make no use of it and only slows down my workflow. I use MyKeyworder for LR and want to have total control of what keywords go attached to the image. Sometimes I want a parent one on a particular image but sometimes I don't (for example some stock agencies limit the number of keywords) and deleting those imported parent ones when you are approaching that limit takes times. With the mentioned plugin I enter what I want and that would be my perfect workflow. Hope some day LR fix this bug and also introduce the option in preferences to deactivate Hierarchy Keywords for those that want only 1 level.

Thank you for your help.