Force lightroom classic to "see" and parse imported keywords

[dvdesignlabs]

Hi. I'm using a plug in to import image keywords into lightroom, and it works great. Except that rather than importing indivudual keywords to the keyword field, it seems to bring in on giant keyword that contains a number of commas. Then when the image is exported, it exports out the "keywords" as one big keyword. If I click into the keyword field and do anything, like add a comma after the last keyword, Lightroom will snap out of it and parse and alphabatize all the keywords. But that's impractical and slow for a lot of images.

For example, I import keywords like "monkey, bubble, blow, sitting... etc." and they are written to the keyword field. It looks normal, except they are not sorted. And if I look at my master keyword list it shows a keyword called, "monkey, bubble, blow, sitting..." etc. - one giant keyword. And if I export the file, the IPTC reader shows "Keyword [1] monkey, bubble, blow, sitting..." and no Keyword [2] etc. And since the length of an individual keyword is limited, it truncates the entire list at the limit of Keyword [1] and it's useless to import.

As I say, typing anything into the keyword field snaps it to where I need it to be, but it's a pain. Any ideas to get Lightroom to "see" and parse the imported keyword data?

I tried to select all images and the add a comma or something to the combined keyword field, but in that case Lightroom writes ALL the kewords to ALL the images, which is a huge mess.

Other ideas? Not sure the would be called a bug but it's odd and unexpected. Thanks. This is LR Classic 12.5 on a Mac.

[johnrellis]

Sounds like a bug in the plugin -- what is it?

[dvdesignlabs]

Thanks. That's a possibility and I have already emailed the plugin author for feedback. The plugin is LR/Transporter.

[johnrellis · Accepted solution]

[This post contains formatting and embedded images that don't appear in email. View the post in your Web browser.]

Hopefully the author Timothy Armes will respond, though lots of people have reported in recent years he's hard to reach.

I see that the documentation doesn't specify how keywords in the input CSV should be formatted. Perhaps you didn't see this hint:

When I follow those instructions, the plugin imports keywords correctly.

[dvdesignlabs]

Ugh. That note is not on the screenshot on the LR/Transport instructions page, which I looked at carefully, and I did not see it on the live screen. It's a hassle to transform only the commas the keyword list to simicolons (I can't control this on export of the CSV file). But after doing that transformation, it does indeed work.

Thanks much for your help, I appreciate it @johnrellis