Nowegian letters Æ, Ø and Å as first letter in keywords fails

[RuneGN]

I have a problem with LRC, not recognizing the Norwegian letters Æ, Ø and Å in the beginning of a keyword. These letters are common in Norwegian, and some words have them as the first letter, also among my keywords.

For instance, the name “Øyerfjellet”, the name of a region in the nearby mountains. Taking lots of pictures there and tagging them with the name is normal for me, I’ve done that a lot.  This works well, if I use small first letters, avoiding capital first letter in the filter, even if it is written with a capital letter in the list.

Lately filtering the keyword list to this word, or any word starting with one of these three letters fails, the word can not be found. If I skip writing the first letter in the filter, only writing “yerfjellet”, the keyword is found. If the letter is within the word, there is no problem finding it in the list. In Word and other windows apps, searching for these letters is without any problems.

A solution to this would be appreciated!

My systemem: LRC 13.1, and Windows 11 Home v22H2

[johnrellis]

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Hmm, on my LR 13.1 / Windows 11, I don't observe that problem:

Some initial troubleshooting steps:

1. How many keywords do you have in your keyword list?  (Do the menu command Metadata > Export Keywords and edit the exported file in Excel or Notepad -- the line count appears in the lower-left corner.) If you have more than about 1500 keywords, that could be a problem, considering that the problem letters are alphabetized at the end of the Norwegian alphabet (I think).

2. 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.

[JohanElzenga]

I can't reproduce it on my Mac either. I'm not from Norway, but I do like to travel to this stunningly beautiful country, so I do have keywords like 'Åsafossen' (one of the many waterfalls).

[RuneGN]

See pictures of my Keyword filter, and the keywords exported to excel. I’ve got 10.543 lines, they are organized in trees, so I do not know if the counting shows what you mention.

I tried to delete the Helper.lrdata, but it did not help.

[johnrellis]

"I’ve got 10.543 lines, they are organized in trees"

If you upload the exported .txt file with your keywords, or send it to me as an attachment in a private message, I can verify whether in fact you're running into the Windows LR limitation of about 1500 lines displayed in the Keyword List panel and suggest workarounds. Even with the keywords organized hierarchically, it's possible to trip over that limit, especially when filtering the keyword list.

[johnrellis]

I see that the ability send attachments via private messages was removed at some point. So if you don't want to share the keywords .txt file with the forum, you could email it to my plugin-support email address:

https://johnrellis.com/lightroom/anytag.htm#support

[johnrellis]

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@RuneGN, I got your keywords file -- it has 10,542 hierarchical keywords. You're definitely tripping over the Windows LR limitation on the total number of lines that can be displayed in the Keyword List panel without bad things starting to happen.

Due to programming shortcuts taken by the original Windows LR developers, the Keyword List panel is limited to a maximum height of 2^16 - 1 pixels (65,535 pixels).  That translates to about 3276 lines of text when Preferences > Interface > Font Size is Small, and about 1724 lines when Font Size is 200%. LR doesn't do even the simplest beginner-programmer checking for limits, and when it tries to display more than the maximum number of lines, all sorts of screwy things can start happening.

You've got a deep hierarchy of keywords, so keeping most of the hierarchy collapsed ensures that less than the maximum number of lines is displayed. 

But the designed behavior of the Filter Keywords box can still exceed the maximum number of lines displayed. When you type a search string in the box, the panel will show all keywords containing that string, all the containing keywords of those matching keywords, and all the contained keywords of those matching keywords.

For example, when you type "Ø", all 1353 keywords containing that letter (ignoring case) are displayed. But all the keywords containing those matching keywords are also displayed, e.g.

And all the keywords contained by those 1353 matching keywords are also displayed by default:

The result is that when you type "Ø", LR tries to display more than the maximum 3276 lines of text (Font Size = Small) or 1724 lines (Font Size = 200%).

There are these workarounds:

1. Switch to Mac LR, which doesn't have this restriction (it's one of the reasons I switched many years ago). Obviously, this could be very expensive if you do it before you'd normally get a new computer.

2. Click the magnifying glass to the left of the Filter Keywords box and uncheck the option Show All Keywords Inside Matches, which will suppress the display of keywords contained by the matching keywords:

With your keyword list, when you type "Ø" with that option turned off, LR tries to display about 1914 keywords, which is less than the maximum number of lines (3276) when Font Size is Small, but it's still more than the maximum (1724) when Font Size is 200%.

3. Alway search for at least 2 - 3 letters, to ensure the filtered list of keywords is less than the maximum allowed. Type the first 2 - 3 letters into the Filter Keywords box very quickly, or copy/paste the entire search word from another app. LR doesn't start searching the keywords until you've paused a fraction of a second.  If you type slowly, e.g. "Ø" (pause a little) then "vi", LR will start filtering on the first letter and the search results will exceed the maximum, even though the results for "Øvi" won't.

* * *

This bug has existed since LR 1.0, and in my opinion it's very unlikely at this point that Adobe will ever fix it:

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

[RuneGN]

Thanks for your answer! I’ll need to reduce my keyword list, obviously.

I tested one little thing today, I edited the single word “Øyerfjellet” (ie Øyer mountains) to “øyerfjellet”. As a name of a region, it should be with a capital letter, but the small letter did it! Now I can search for it in the Keyword filter, no problems!

Small letters of æ, ø and å within the words was never a problem.

Then maybe I could skip changing to Mac….

[johnrellis]

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"I edited the single word “Øyerfjellet” (ie Øyer mountains) to “øyerfjellet”. As a name of a region, it should be with a capital letter, but the small letter did it! Now I can search for it in the Keyword filter, no problems!"

Curious, in my LR 13.1 / Windows 11, I'm able to search for that keyword in your list with both the upper-case and lower-case versions of the letter:

This difference in behavior isn't unexpected when there are too many keywords.

[johnrellis]

"I’ll need to reduce my keyword list, obviously."

I forgot to mention another workaround that would work with your current list: my Any Tag plugin.

[D Fosse]

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@johnrellis wrote:

that could be a problem, considering that the problem letters are alphabetized at the end of the Norwegian alphabet (I think).

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They are, but in LrC keywords, "æ" and "å" are listed alphabetically as "a", and "ø" is listed as "o". Other than that, all these keywords behave normally.

I'm Norwegian, but use English Windows and Adobe applications.

(Win 10 pro, LrC 13.1)