P: Custom sort order of keywords (instead of alphabetic).

[leighm26990353]

Lightroom needs to stop re-ordering our keywords into an alphabetical order. People who are keywording for stock agencies and other purposes need to order their keywords most important and relevant first. Lightroom ruins this for us. I can't believe it's version 5 and Lightroom hasn't figured this out. Lightroom is single-handedly ruining our sales based on keyword searches. Thanks Adobe

[john beardsworth]

Isn't it only Alamy that ranks images in this way?

There is an Alamy plugin somewhere, and I suspect its author would have addressed this issue.

[leighm26990353]

I'm not on Alamy. But, no, Lightroom does this as soon as you hit enter on your keywords or leave that area of LR. It's definitely a LR issue, and every answer I see to this issue on the Web is that there's nothing you can do about it. So LR needs to change it.

[john beardsworth]

Is custom sorting of keywords specified in the IPTC standard? If not, LR isn't doing anything wrong and it's really a feature request.

[John R Ellis]

See this similar feedback:

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

[armin_staudt]

I'm have the same opinion. It would be so easy to implement a user-sort-order for keywords with the feature "let them untouched"

[John R Ellis]

Make sure you vote on this topic!

[armin_staudt]

I like to have my own sort-order according to keywords. But Lightroom always sort them alphabetically. Exept if I paste them via Photoshop-File-Information (don't know the exact word in english, use german version)
If you do this and save the document Lightroom now export the keywords in the order you choose in PS.

It would be very fine, if the user could decide about his keyword-sortorder by himself in Lightroom.
For people who works with agencies it is an important point.

[leighm26990353]

How do you vote, John?

[John R Ellis]

I'm not strongly in favor of this, nor strongly opposed. I don't have need of maintaining keyword ordering.

[armin_staudt]

I found the alamy-plugin, but no word about sort-order. also fotolia and istock need this "unsorted" keywords.

[John R Ellis]

The Alamy plugin has features for helping you maintain Alamy's Essential and Main ordered keyword lists from within Lightroom, using keywords you've assigned in Lightroom. See in particular pages 19 and 25 of the plugin manual.

[armin_staudt]

if the keywords are in lightroom no plugin of the world will help you to reorder them after lightroom delete the original order...
Essential keywords are some different. This is an extra empty text area within some agencies, like phantermedia, bigstock, alamy etc. Normally I type them by hand, its faster.

[John R Ellis]

Agreed that LR is losing the original order and that's unfortunate for what you want to do. But the Alamy plugin does appear to provide some useful features for working with keywords more efficiently with LR and Alamy.

[armin_staudt]

I will try it, but normally you will be with more than one agency. I have about 10 or more and alamy is one of the less important one's.

[leighm26990353]

No, that's not what I meant, John. You said be sure and vote on this topic. I was not aware you could vote on topics, so I was asking how to do that. Also, does voting on topics give them more importance to Adobe?

[John R Ellis]

To vote on a topic, click the +1 button at the top:

[John R Ellis]

Adobe set up this site as the official place to submit feedback, bug reports, and suggestions. I don't work for Adobe, but I think it's reasonable to assume that votes on topics influence Adobe's product planning, at least in a small way. See this FAQ:

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

[leighm26990353]

Thanks for all your feedback, John. I appreciate it.

[armin_staudt]

Maybe the aimed customer for LR is not the professional photographer?
I asked in some communities and no one uses LR.
In all other applications, Photoshop, Bridge, CaptureOne the keywords stay in the order you type it in.
LR has so many features to mange and deal with keywords, so I really don't understand why this little feature could be build in or better out.

I don't want to change to CaptureOne, but I have to, I fear.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I don't contribute to Alamy. Therefore the plug-in will not do me any good.
I believe Adobe will take care of this issue. Many thousands of stock agencies contributors are eagerly awaiting for the solution.
John, thank you very much for the feedback.

[John R Ellis]

George wrote, "I believe Adobe will take care of this issue."

Unfortunately, Adobe has made very few changes to keywording or other core library functions in the last several years, even though there's been lots of feedback here and the user-to-user forums about desired bug fixes and improvements. It would be great if they started improving the LR library, but I'm not holding my breath.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

If in the long run Adobe keeps ignoring the keywording problem in Lightroom, I will definitely switch to other solutions. My time is valuable. I can not afford doing the same task twice. One time in Lightroom and then one more time for each stock agency I contribute to.
In the forthcoming Lightroom updates Adobe must give the users the possibility to select the keywords order.

[john beardsworth]

How many other stock agencies utilize the keyword order? It's a business practice, rather than an iptc standard which Adobe would observe, and I'd question if the practice is widespread .

[armin_staudt]

It would be enough if one important agency organized it in this way. It cost hours and hours of work ... On the other hand, if you keywording in PS or Bridge the keywords will remain in the sort-order you want. So Adobe is not able to hold their own standard. There is really no need to force all stock-photographer to stay away from LR.

[john beardsworth]

But they don't force *all* stock photographers to stay away, and Lightroom's ethos was to be a ground-up design - previous examples like PS/Br are not a standard. So which other agencies utilize keyword order? How widespread is this practice?