keyword search not working in LR

[owenpga2]

Just reset preferences on LR. Keyword search does not work like it should. when i type in a keyword it should populate that keyword underneith the search bar. also, this morning i was doing some searches off the main drop down that shows ALL the keywords and now the drop down looks like this. not sure exactly what i did but things are definetly wonky with this feature. keyword search does work when im using the library filter at top of screen. 

[Aleke]

Hi @owenpga2, thanks for reaching out.
Could you confirm the exact version of Lightroom Classic you’re using? Also, approximately how many keywords are in your catalog? When there are more than 1,500 keywords, display issues can occur:
https://adobe.ly/4ja71vw
It may also help to check if the issue is catalog-specific by creating a new catalog and seeing if the problem persists there.
Thanks!
Alek

[johnrellis]

"When there are more than 1,500 keywords, display issues can occur"

That issue only applies on Windows:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-bugs/p-windows-panel-is-limited-to-1600-items-folde...

But @owenpga2 is on Mac.

I believe that help article:

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

used to mention that this was a Windows-only problem, but the article appears to have been edited to remove mention of that.

[owenpga2]

doesn't happen in new catalog.

already tried deleting the help irdata file. nothing changes.

definetly not at 1500 keywords

[owenpga2]

version 15.1

[johnrellis]

"doesn't happen in new catalog."

That narrows it down to something specific with that catalog.  Your screenshot shows individual keywords such as "apple, crates" that contain commas, which LR used to allow but now prohibits, and in the past LR has sometimes gotten confused by these spurious commas. This may or may not be the cause of your issue, but it will take close technical examination of your catalog file to determine what the cause might be. If you share a copy of the catalog file with me, I can fairly quickly determine whether it's the commas or perhaps something else that's causing the problems:

1. Go to Catalog Settings > General and click Show, which will open Finder with the catalog folder selected.

2. In the catalog folder, right-click the "<catalog>.lrcat" file and do Compress to create a .zip of the .lrcat file.

3. Upload the .zip to Wetransfer, Dropbox, Google Drive or similar free service.

4. Send me a private message with the sharing link. To send a private message, view this thread in a web browser, not your email app. Click "johnrellis" or "JRE" in one of the previous replies from me and then click Message in the upper-left corner. 

[owenpga2]

Hi John 

would it make sense to export my current as a catalog a rename new cat?

[johnrellis]

Sometimes exporting all the photos as a new catalog fixes corruption issues but often not.

[owenpga2]

thansk John

sent you a message with file. thanks Owen

[johnrellis · Accepted solution]

The keywords in the catalog you sent were indeed corrupted, in a way that I hadn't seen before.  I sent you a Dropbox link to a corrected copy of the .lrcat file.  It's surely a bug in LR that corrupted the keywords, though no one has been able to figure out a way to reproduce the bug so Adobe could fix it.

Be sure to make a backup copy of the current catalog, then replace it's .lrcat with the corrected one and delete the Helper.lrdata file (all while LR is not running, of course).

There were many keywords containing commas, e.g. "apple, crates".  LR doesn't allow commas, but it doesn't always check to prevent them. The commas in your keywords probably came from photos that you imported after they were modified by programs or services that don't conform with industry metadata standards. 

I don't know for a fact that the presence of these commas in your keywords caused the corrupted keywords, but there's a strong possibility they did.  So in the corrected catalog I sent you, keywords containing commas, e.g. "apple, creates", were replaced with multiple keywords, e.g. "apple" and "crates".

Before doing more "real" work with the correct catalog, I recommend you poke around the keywords and tagged faces, making sure the keywords are what you expect and appear to be working correctly.

[owenpga2]

Morning John

Thanks for your help with fixing the corrupt catalog. BIG HELP!. for whatever reason it couldn't find the data file so my ai stuff was missing on those files. fortunate for me i don't use the LR denoise and some of the other ai features so its wasn't a big deal.  You mentioned not using commas?? if you go into the "click here to add keywords" below the keyword window, it adds all the keywords separated by commas? Thats confusing if LR doesn't want you to used commas. 

[johnrellis]

In the Keywording panel, LR recognizes commas as separating keywords. So if you type:

A, B, C

LR will add three separate keywords "A", "B", and "C" to the photo.

But some programs don't conform to the industry standard.  When you type:

A, B, C

they will add a single keyword "A, B, C" containing those commas.  That's part of what happened in your catalog -- you had many keywords that contained the commas, e.g. a keyword "apple, crates".  

At least one of these programs added such comma-containing keywords to your photos before they were imported into LR.   And LR doesn't handle that situation very gracefully.

I suspect but don't have hard evidence that the presence of photos with comma-containing keywords can sometimes cause LR to corrupt the keyword list in the catalog.

[johnrellis]

@owenpga2, try deleting the Helper.lrdata folder:

a) Do Catalog Settings > General > Show to open Finder / File Explorer on the current catalog folder.
b) Exit LR.
c) In that folder, delete the folder "<catalog> Helper.lrdata".
d) Restart LR, and it will rebuild the folder.

The Helper.lrdata folder caches information about metadata, keywords, folders, collections, and other things to speed the performance of LR and it can sometimes get corrupted. In recent versions, LR has used it more heavily to improve the speed of displaying metadata, and there have been a fair number of bugs with it.