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

[areohbee]

I think you could *almost* accomplish the goal now by doing this:

* Pre-pend a 0-padded number to keep them ordered the way you want.
* Remove the prefix upon export using Jeffrey Friedl's Metadata Wrangler.

I say "almost" because Jeffrey's plugin requires each prefix be specified individually (pattern matching not supported), which may be prohibitive, or maybe not (?)

That said, if the concept is sound (keywords are orderable using the prefix, and order can be maintained by exiftool upon export), then one could request Jeffrey implement pattern matching, and if design not making that easy (or he's too busy..), maybe somebody else could add that to a different plugin, e.g. me to Exportant.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Keywords in custom sort order are necessary! Everyone should choose in what order want keywords, not only for stock photography but in general! Adobe should correct this as soon as possible, it is very important for photographer in digital era! LR is the better software! This is, for my opinion, the only necessary thing to add.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Keywords in custom sort order are necessary! Everyone should choose in what order want keywords, not only for stock photography but in general! Adobe should correct this as soon as possible, it is very important for photographer in digital era! LR is the better software! This is, for my opinion, the only necessary thing to add.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

There are at least three stock agencies that require the keywords sorted by relevancy: Alamy, Fotolia and Panthermedia.

So this is not a single use case, but a nneded feature for professional stock photographers...

[armin_staudt]

iStock, pixta, ...

[john beardsworth]

Great to get that info, finally. Do you know any more details? For example, do they use all the keywords to assess relevance or only (say) the first 5 keywords. I wouldn't bet on Adobe implementing this (not least as I think it would force them to add other features such as a switch between alpha and non-alpha sorting) but more detail might allow a plug-in to provide a solution that's better and sooner. You might even ask the stock agency to create their own LR plug-in - it might be self-interest....

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

@john: It depends on the stock agencies. Fotolia ranks the first 7 higher, Panthermedia the first 8, Alamy has a system of different degrees, not sure about the other ones mentioned...

[areohbee]

+pictage (requires sorted keywords too).

[armin_staudt]

I think it's not the question if an agency it need's and how. There is really no reason to force a photographer how he has to manage his keywords. Photoshop does not, Bridge not and ie. captureone also not.

I have over 20 agencies and each of these has a different way to deal with keywords. So I think it would be very difficult to change LR in this direction.

The switch between apha- and non-alpha would be great, also a tool where you can drag and drop the keywords in the correct order - also to mange older photos with alpha-sorting.

For the motivation of adobe, if a small agency like pixta has 141.000 contributors you can imagine how many potential customers you can find in this world.

I love LR very much and work with it many hours a day, but all the hours I need for the workaround for this "bug" are not necessary.

(again sorry for my bad English 😉

[Homy2024]

My suggestion is that a "Custom order" option should be added to the "Keyboarding" LR panel.

Entered keywords would be ordered alphabetically by default but the user would have the option to: overing the pointer on each keyword would highlight it and from that point clicking and dragging would automatically enable the "Custom order" and the keyword position would change according to position where the mouse click is released.

I believe it would be a easy feature to implement and that would solve all the users needs.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Is there no one who want to create/write a plugin for this? I believe that people want to pay for this also.

[John R Ellis]

I've thought about adding a feature to maintain keyword order to my Any Tag plugin. But it would take a fair amount of effort to work around various limitations of the LR SDK, and I'm pretty sure I would sell no more than a handful of additional licenses.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Why not do it regardless how many additional licenses you sell?

[John R Ellis]

My time is limited, as I'm sure yours is too.

[STUDIO GRAND OUEST]

Dear Lightroom,

Could you please add the option of custom sort order of keywords or not changing the order of keywords put together in a smart manner by your users: amateurs and professionals?
As long as this "option" is not in place as it is in bridge - your bridge software! - and CaptureOne, I cannot buy into your system as a professional photographer.

Thank you for letting us know when you move forward - we seem to be a more important community as you may think!

Laurent Hamels - STUDIO GRAND OUEST on 6 world stock agencies

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

"I can't believe it's version 6 and Lightroom hasn't figured this out." Or is it just ignorance? Considering that the automatic sorting is a build in feature that required additional programming efforts it would be a 2 Minute programming task excluding this "feature" by adding a checkbox. By the looks of it professional photographers requirements don't count for Adobe.Ignorance is bliss ... I'm seriously disappointed.

[armin_staudt]

The same with me. Frustrating this kind of ignorance.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Really frustrating. It can't be that difficult to add custom keyoword ordering to LR?

[john beardsworth]

As far as I can see, the order in which you write keywords is not stored anywhere in LR's catalogue. That's partly because LR is a database, but also because keyword order isn't part of the IPTC standard which Adobe would factor into the design. Modifying the catalogue isn't a 2 minute job.

I've been experimenting with a plugin which does the job, but the workflow isn't ideal. Again, it's not a 2 minute job.

[john beardsworth]

It's neither impossible nor as easy as you might imagine.

[praweenap81199154]

Why Lightroom not Improve about this problem, the programer just improve this program for customer and let them choose that they want LR to arrange the keword or not.
I think if Lightroom want to fixed this it is very easy and all stockphotographer over the world will appriciate this!

[praweenap81199154]

Lightroom is very good programe,just 1 little problem should be solve.
About the keyword, can you make it not arrange by alphabet.I want to arrange it by myself.If you can solve this problem all stock photographer over the world will appreciate it!

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I ́d like to know, if there are any thoughts on implying a new function to lightroom to sort the key words manually. Many stock photographers would be very very glad if they could sort the keywords given to a picture in a free order. Are you planning kind of these functions?

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Absolutely agree. This is one of the main annoyances in Lightroom. If Lightroom wouldn't have such an effective sharpening algorithm and if there weren't a few very useful plug-ins available, I'd not use it at all. I'm missing Aperture!!! Maybe I'll just use MediaPro together with several converters in the future.

[armin_staudt]

funny, one of the most important agencies who has this "sort-after-priority-thing" is Fotolia. And who bought Fotolia last year? So all people who wants to upload their work to Fotolia couln't use LR for it.
Really funny.