Top hierarchy tag exported even if the option is not selected

[mastix]

I have all my keywords under alphabetic top hierarchy tags because if there are too many (as I would like without hierarchy) they will not show in the list because of some Windows limit as far as I know. I have the option to include on export not checked. It doesn't matter . It gets exported anyway and when I use a third delivery program for images I have to keep erasing all those alphabet letters that got exported with the keywords.

Is there any way around it ?

I hope someday Lightroom will let us disable all the hierarchy feature altogether and we can have all our keywords in one list available to review. Don't know if this has been accomplished in windows 11 and that maximum number of characters limit has been solved ?

But for the time being an efective way to say maybe in the EXPORT panel-Do not export any top hierarchy word would solve the issue.

[Ian Lyons]

Have you unchecked the Keyword Tag Option 'Include on Export' as shown in attached screenshot?

The Edit Keyword Tag is available from the  context menu for each keyword.

[mastix]

Yes.

I think I found what the problem/bug is. Even with that not checked the top words get exported. They should not as when you look at the Keyword tags "will export" those top level words are not there. But when you finally export they will get exported and be visible in another software that reads metadata (in my case DeepMeta to upload images to Gettyimages).......UNLESS you also select in the export window option (I convert to JPgs from Tiffs) the METADATA panel (Include all Metadata ) AND "Write keywords as Lightroom Hierarchy" This has to be checked . Does not matter if you did not check the "Include on export" those keywords will not be ignored unless you have that option checked in LR.

This is not intuitive at all because as you said you think that once you have the Include on export blank it would not matter if you check or not the "Write keywords as Lightroom Hierarchy". But it matters. 

[johnrellis]

I'm observing different (and nearly correct) behavior. 

I assigned the hierarchical keyword XX > YY to a photo, and unchecked the attribute Export Containing Keywords of keyword YY. Here's what Exiftool shows in the various metadata fields that contain keywords when the export option Write Keywords As Lightroom Hierarchy is unchecked and checked:

This behavior is all correct (as-designed), except for the cell shown in red -- Adobe has acknowledged that as a bug:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-bugs/p-adobe-stock-publishing-service-uploads-a-key...

IPTC:Keywords and XMP:Subject are the industry-standard fields containing keywords, and LR always sets them to have the same value. These are the fields that other apps read to get the keywords.

XMP:WeightedFlatSubject and XMP:HierarchicalSubject are Adobe proprietary metadata fields that most apps don't understand and ignore. As far as I know, XMP:WeightedFlatSubject is only understood by LR and the Adobe Stock service; thus, the bug shown in red above only affects users of Adobe Stock.

[mastix]

Thank you for your reply. For me the only way that the system does NOT export the parent keyword is if I leave the "Write keywords as Lightroom Hierarchy" activated. Even if I have the "include on export" blank.

Not intuitive at all. You would think that if that option is blank or you don't use the hierarchy the parent would not get exported. Just the contrary happens.

I any case doing this convoluted workaround as I explained will get rid of the parent keywords and that is what I needed.

I still wish that the parent keywords would NOT show up in the "enter keywords" option in the Library module as it makes everything so much more difficult to read. I can use the will export option that is cleaner but then again in this view I cannot copy and paste keywords.

The metadata panel in LR is quite messy in my point of view it should be reworked from 0 one day because there are so many things that are wrong in it that it would be a really advance the day they update it.

[johnrellis]

"For me the only way that the system does NOT export the parent keyword is if I leave the "Write keywords as Lightroom Hierarchy" activated. Even if I have the "include on export" blank."

Sounds like something is misbehaving in your LR installation -- as explained above, this is not how LR normally behaves.  How are you checking for the presence of the keywords in the exported photos?

[mastix]

Yes. You are correct, and this is driving me nuts. Because before I was doing hierarchy like drone-drone point of view but now not anymore as this was a huge mess and time waste. But now I have always those hierarchy symbols as you pointed out all over my enter keywords and I do not want that. I cannot copy and paste and that is fundamental for me

In fact, I want to get rid of all this hierarchy feature. I wish I could just with a push of a button compact all the words without any hierarchy anymore and discard the duplicated words. That would be a dream . But such an easy thing is not available on LR

How would you proceed?

I thought of embedding and saving all the metadata in my images and erase the catalog and start from scratch. It will be a huge pain but I do not see any other way to destroy all the hierarchies and have all my keywords at the same level

[johnrellis]

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"I still wish that the parent keywords would NOT show up in the "enter keywords" option in the Library module as it makes everything so much more difficult to read."

Please post a full-resolution screenshot (not a phone pic) showing how Enter Keywords is displaying parent keywords, and include the relevant section(s) of the Keyword List.

The only time Enter Keywords will display parent keywords is when there are multiple keywords with the same leaf name. For example, if the keyword list has two keywords, John < Smith and John < Ellis, there are two leaf keywords named "John". So LR will display the parents to make clear which keyword is being referenced:

[mastix]

Yes. You are correct, and this is driving me nuts. Because before I was doing hierarchy like drone-drone point of view but now not anymore as this was a huge mess and time waste. But now I have always those hierarchy symbols as you pointed out all over my enter keywords and I do not want that. I cannot copy and paste and that is fundamental for me

In fact, I want to get rid of all this hierarchy feature. I wish I could just with a push of a button compact all the words without any hierarchy anymore and discard the duplicated words. That would be a dream . But such an easy thing is not available on LR

How would you proceed with this problem? Is there another way to destroy all the hierarchies into one single level on tags?

I thought of embedding and saving all the metadata in my images and erase the catalog and start from scratch. It will be a huge pain but I do not see any other way to destroy all the hierarchies and have all my keywords at the same level

[johnrellis]

"I want to get rid of all this hierarchy feature."

The only way to get rid of the hierarchy is by opening the Keyword List panel and dragging each child keyword to the top level.  But if you have duplicate keywords, e.g. "village" and "village < V", you'll need to merge them, manually (see below).  I don't know of any plugin that will automate that, unfortunately.

HOWEVER, I see that you have lots of parent keywords A, B, C, etc. I'm guessing that you have more than about 1500 keywords, and that those parents were introduced at some point to avoid the longstanding severe bugs with Windows LR and keyword lists with more than 1500 keywords?

If you do have that many (or coming close to that many), you can't get rid of the hierarchy without tripping over the bugs, in which LR refuses to display the entire keyword list in the Keyword List panel and in the Library Filter bar.  In this case, you'll need to retain a hierarchy, so you can keep most of it collapsed when using the Keyword List panel and avoid tripping over the bugs.

But you can stop LR from displaying the keyword parents, e.g. "village < V", in the Keywording panel by merging the duplicate keywords ("village" and "village < V").  To merge those two:

1. In the Keyword List panel, hover the mouse over  the  top-level "village" keyword  until the right arrow magically appears to the right of the keyword.   

2. Click that right arrow to show only those photos assigned the top-level "village".

3. Select all those photos.

4. In the Keywording panel, add the keyword "village < V" (or "V > village", which is equivalent).   All those photos now have both keywords assigned, "village" and "village < V".

5. In the Keyword List panel, delete the top-level "village".  Assuming there are no other instances of "village" in your hierarchy, the keyword "village < V" will now display simply as "village" in the Keywording panel.

[mastix]

Thank you very much. You are absolutely correct about this catch 22 situation. This is now the main reason I am thinking of moving all my cataloging (I have maybe a dozen different catalogs) to Photo Mechanic plus -I hope they don't have this limitation-will have to try their demo first.

It is so frustrating that over a decade Adobe has been incapable to find a solution to this problem 😞

Right now I have started to do all the slow method to deleting the duplicate words one by one. I am in lettter B now and I will bump into the bug at some point. Lets hope it is very down in the alphabet.....and then maybe adopt the solution your propose for the rest...?¿?

But even doing so if in a few months I import one of those images hierarchy keywords I will have that problem again- as far as I know you cannot import keywords without the hierarchy order- This is all so bad thought......

In any case, thank you very much for your help.- You are very aware of the problem and described it perfectly.