P: Better keyword management

[joopsnijder]

How about some better support for keyword management. It's very basic now. I would like to do the following tasks:- Delete multiple keywords at once. Not all plugins do handle hierarchy keywords well and add all the keywords to the root level. It's a tedious task to delete them one by one.- Search for duplicates.- Merge keywords. With lots of tricks, it can be done, but it's so inefficient.- Import keywords from within any level in the keyword hierarchy. Now you can only import keywords to the root level.- And for now last but most important: Real external editing of the keyword list. Moving keywords around and doing real heavy reorganization is difficult in LR. I would like to have an editing option like exporting and when reimported all changes are reflected in LR.

[Califdan2]

The Boolean capability of LR filters is somewhat limited. Each column in the filter is AND'd with each other column and multiple selections within a column are Or'd. So you can create (Keyword = A or B) AND (camera = Canon 5d). But what you can't do is (Keyword = "Good" OR Camera = Canon 5d). To do that you must either do multiple steps (e.g., do keyword filter, save results in quick collection, then do camera selection and add those images to QC) or use a smart collection.

Smart collection allow pretty any Boolean logic but the way they implemented it - to try and make it simple for people unfamiliar with Boolean logic - is quite cumbersome to those who just want to type out a Boolean string. In Smart collections, you start by deciding if your level 1 elements are to be "ANY" or "ALL" (OR or AND) in relation to each other. then you add a row for each thing you want in your logic. Many times this is sufficient.

However if you want to mix AND and OR operations you have to nest down to level 2 or lower. Do this by holding down the ALT key (Option on MAC) and the "+" signs at the right end of the level one elements become "#" signs. Click the "#" sign and you start a new group one level lower. This new group consists of rows that can be AND'd or OR's and the result of the entire group is then applied to Level 1. So level one could be ALL (AND) of: Rating=3, Keyword=Fred, Group2. Then group 2 could be ANY (OR) of: Color label = Blue, camera=Canon 5d.

Here's a boolean representation of this: AND (Rating=3, Keyword="Fred", OR (Color=blue, Camera=5d))

Here's the same thing written in a different way: (Rating=3 AND Keyword="Fred" AND (Color=Blue OR Camera=5d))

Like I said, it's a bit complex but once you build a few it is usable. There are some features that would make it easier like being able to drag one row or group to another position rather than having to delete and re-add but at least it can get the job done.

Dan

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Yes, in addition to better keywords, it is critical that the metadata remain persistent. There is a problem now that many social media sites, remove metadata from files upon ingestion. It is critical that Adobe exert their influence to preserve the metadata hard-working photographers attach and embed in their files.

[Louie Sherwin]

This is a good idea. The current one by one is horribly tedious. 

-louie

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

"Merge keywords. With lots of tricks, it can be done, but it's so inefficient."
How?

[alanterra]

Go to Keyword panel. Find the keyword that you want to delete. Click on the right arrow to just show all photos with that keyword. Select all. Find the keyword you want to merge to. Click it to set that keyword in all these photos. Then click the old keyword to unset it in all these photos. Then right click the old keyword and delete the keyword.

[Califdan2]

this process will not work if some images with the KW being merged are buried in collapsed stacks.  First you need to Expand all stacks that may have images with the keyword.  However, many times it's hard to know which folders those are.  So, you have expand all stacks first.  Then Alan's process will work but if you have 10's of thousands of images it's quite a bit of processing and time and then you lose any sense you've applied to which stacks are collapsed vs expanded.  

An alternative method is to create a temporary smart collection where the only rule is that the images have the keyword you want to merge into another.  Smart collections show all images that meet the criteria regardless of stack status.  Then click on the smart collection and select all images and continue with Alan's steps. 

[KarlReed.OZ]

I have no idea how a company adobe can let such a silly system remain. Its' 1960's stuff to come up with a system in which, if I provide <keyword1>,..<keywordn>, it will retrieve every entry that has <keyword1>^..^<keywordn>. (Position independent conjunctive search)This is known to be surprisingly good at retrieving things, because the user does not need to know which attribute has the required keyword.
Now, this can be combined with a simple, attribute independent Boolean search, and then also an attribute based Boolean search. All cases can (given the small size of even the largest collections) allow for unix style wild characters and keywords. The queries can return lists which can be toggled to display other attributes such as locations and folders., and link to them.
Then, as another option, some of the really complex, LR dependent searches can be allowed for.
All these can easily coexist, and, an organisation like adobe can do it all.
BTW, they are not the only ones who mess things like this up!
Karl Reed

[alanterra]

Dan

I am sure your comments are correct (I have never used stacks), but your proposed solution runs into another deficiency in Lightroom -- you can't have smart collections with exact match of a keyword. This problem is at least 5 years old, and is especially annoying for those of us who use multi-word keywords. Given your comments about stacks, I guess it is "inefficient" if not "annoyingly difficult" to merge keywords.

[Califdan2]

Ahh, good point if you need an exact match.  There are a couple of ways to deal with that in my example with Smart Collections.   One is to put 2 rules in the smart collection, one using "Starts with" and the other using "Ends with" and put the entire keyword into both arguments.  

A second, and simpler, approach is to first bugger up the keyword.  Let's say the keyword is "Red Race Car",  Right click on it and change it to jibberish (e.g.  "QWERTYUIO").  It doesn't really matter what you use as we'll be deleting the entire KW once it's images are merged into another KW anyway.  Just pick text that you are sure doesn't appear (in whole or in part) in any other KW.  Then use the jibberish KW in the Smart Collection Rule using either "contains" or "contains all" and only images with that jibberish KW will be found 

Dan

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Ahh, not the kind of merge i'm trying to do.

I want to merge keywords from the picture into catalog of LR. 'Read metadata from file' replace the keywords in the catalog with the keywords in the picture. I want to merge them to LR catalog.

Just to clarify; the keywords saved in the picture was added to files after the picture was added to the LR catalog.

[nahcr]

I wish lightroom would allow keywords or at least the first N letters of the keywords to show up as headers or footers on the grid and loupe view.  I get 1000 videos that each have to have one keyword attached.  most of the time each one is different from the previous and most of the time they follow in a more or less expected sequence.  if i could see the keywords i have already attached, it would be much less confusing - i would be able to quickly find all the videos that havent been keyworded without hiding the ones that have been keyworded.  if i hide the keyworded files, then i cant remember where i was in the sequence.  thee problems plus the fact that videos do not play automatically when you open them in the loupe view means that i find Dopus easier to use for this task.  and like others have said, why cant we have batch renames for keywords?  and better batch renames for files too.   

[alanterra]

I do all of my file renaming outside of Lightroom (using A Better Finder Rename 10 before adding the files to Lightroom), but you are aware of the renaming abilities baked into Jeffrey Friedl's Collection Publisher? I haven't used them, but they look pretty powerful.

[Califdan2]

you don't say if the video's come with KW's or you add them.  If you add them yourself, try putting the KW text into the "Copy" field in the metadata panel at the same time you create the KW.  Copy name is easily added to the fields displayed in the grid.

Not sure what you mean by batch rename for KW's?  If you have a KW named "Red" and want to rename it "Pink" for all images that have it, just right click the KW, select edit and type "Pink" right over "Red" and then click Save.  All images that had "red" will now have "pink".  Is that what you're talking about or something else?

Can you be more specific about what you think is missing in batch file rename?  I used LR file rename regularly and find it good enough.

[nahcr]

Alan- I should look into Friedl's collection publisher - it might be a solution, thank you.
Dan- the videos (of one sign each from different sign languages) arrive from all over the world in all different formats (which incidentally lightroom cannot always handle, but possibly that is my computer not lightroom).  They are also named just about anything you can imagine, and i want to rename them to a standard format so they have a keyword gloss, a version number, a language identifier, a signer identification, a creation date in the format 20160721 and then a "sequence number" that connects the renamed video to the original name so that if i need to i can go back and match this video to an original unrenamed version.   a sample video would look like: sheepvv1lxrw1sg210dt20160721sqAed893xyz. 
i can rename the files in dopus, and then go to lightroom, import, add one keyword to each file, and then rename the file with that keyword at the front.  there is for example no way to insert the keyword into the middle of the filename.  if i make a mistake and use the wrong gloss, i have to correct it in dopus.  if i accidentally rename twice so that i get sheepsheepfilename, no simple way to remove all the duplicate keywords - again have to go to dopus.  in other words i can't tell lightroom please remove all of the material before the version number.    sometimes i have to change the language id.  i can't tell lightroom please change all occurences of lxamr to lxrw1.  and so on.  

[nahcr]

also, im not sure about your remark about the metadata copy field.  i am dealing with 15,000 to 20,000 videos (1000 for each language), and i need something quick.  the keywords i have can be reasonably easily added by typing the first few letters or checking the keyword in the keyword list (the keywords are more or less in sequence).  Is there any automatic way to add the keyword to the metadata also?

[alanterra]

rachel, I don't understand your question entirely, but it's my belief that almost any keyword problem can be solved using a scripting language (for Macintosh, try AppleScript or Bash) and exiftool. However, if you are not comfortable developing scripts, you would have to find someone to do that for you.

I have an Applescript that I use on all my photos before I add them to Lightroom. The files are renamed according to certain conventions, and certain metadata applied to every file. While it is slow, and adds a step before I can look at my photos in Lightroom, it enforces a structure that I find helpful in the long run.

[Califdan2]

In your comments, I'm not sure what "gloss" means and in your example I assume "sheep" is the KW and the rest of the file name is your code for language, version, signer, date, etc.).  But it sounds like your goal is to wind up with 3 things.  1) a file name that has some text you type in, a version number you supply, and some or all of the originally sent file name.  2) Assign a unique KW to each Video, and 3) be able to see that KW in the grid.  

A couple of ideas.  you can create a file naming pattern preset that gets applied during import.  Part of the file name pattern can include custom text you supply when you use it - you could use this filed for your KW+language+Signer+etc. assuming that could all be one string in the filename - and a sequence number you supply when you use it - which could be your version number.  If you're importing only one video at a time, the sequence number is your version number.  If you import multiple video's at at time it is the starting number.   In the import dialog you can also type or paste in an actual KW on the same screen.  Or, after import, you could just alter the file name of each video by over typing in the file name field in the metadata panel.  At the same time you could cut/paste or type the KW into the Copy Name field which is right below the file name field.  

You may also want to look at the jfriedl "Metadata Wrangler" plug in.  I don't use it, but it may be of some help.

Dan


 

[nahcr]

two kinds of batch rename - keywords and files.  keywords:  suppose i need to number the keywords temporarily.  i have to either individually drag them to higher level keywords or rename each one individually to have a number.  the example above of changing red to pink is an example of a one-time, not a batch rename.  what if i want to rename every keyword that has red inside it to pink?  or more realistically, i want to change every example of Smith to Jones for multiple individuals?
batch rename of files:  suppose  i add two keywords to a file name, they get separated by commas.  if i want to remove those commas, i have to close lightroom, go to dopus and delete the commas in the filename.  now i go back to lightroom and guess what ive lost all the keywords when i reimport the files.  this kind of behaviour doesnt create a lot of trust that the keywords will be permanent parts of the file.  same thing with entering a date that needs to be corrected or any element of a file name.  all that lightroom allows is additions to a filename.  there is no way to change string xxx to string yyy

[PaulFBarrett]

I know there are other threads on here that document extensive ideas around managing the keywords library.  And I thoroughly support them.  However the combined ideas represent a huge body of work.  In the meantime I (and many others on the forums) would like one very simple change:

  - The ability to merge multiple keywords 
The ugly workaround is to select the unwantedkeyword, display the images , select all, click and drag the wanted keywordonto the images, then delete the unwanted keyword.  This is a long-winded and error pronemethod.  I should be able to select the keywords, right click and choose 'Merge Keywords." (yeah, there would need to be some way to identify the keyword into which the others should be merged)

[ianbutty]

Paul, I agree 100%. Merging keywords at the moment is a real pain.

[Geoff the kiwi]

Yes, merging would be great.... 

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

In general, Lightroom needs much better data management. Merging is critical, but there are many other deficits.

[MontyMontgomery]

Excellent idea!  I would love to see a larger keywording panel!
Monty

[DebS55]

I'd like to see a batch method to remove a single or multiple keywords from MULTIPLE photos at a time.  When I remove the keyword from one image, and try to sync, the keyword is NOT removed from the other photos selected.  It is tedious to open every photo and manually delete a keyword - Adobe, please, create a way to simply delete the keywords from ALL photos selected.  Thanks

[johnrellis]

Deb Snelson asked, "I'd like to see a batch method to remove a single or multiple keywords from MULTIPLE photos at a time."

There are two ways to do that.  First, select all the photos from which you want to remove the keywords. Then look at the Keyword List panel on the right side of Library:



A check indicates the keyword has been applied to all the selected photos, while a "-" indicates it's been applied to some but not all of the photos.  To remove the keyword from all the selected photos, click the check once or the hyphen twice, until it's blank.

Alternatively, look at the Keywording panel just above:



This shows all the keywords applied to the selected photos. An asterisk indicates the keyword has been applied to some but not all of the photos.  To remove the keyword from all the selected photos, just select it with the mouse (and any trailing asterisk) and hit the delete / backspace key.