How to delet little used keywords in lightroom classic 10.2 and impact on performance

[Klozaw]

Short of pain stakingly working through my keyword list keyword by keyword, is there a more efficient way to identify, evaluate and delete keywords that are infrequently used?

Unfortunately, I've allowed my keywords to become a cancerous mess. I now have 5,904 Keywords. This seems very inefficient and I imagine it is a drain on LR performance.

I estimate that at least 1/3 of my Keywords could/should be deleted as they are either not unique, no longer meaningful or other keywords in the photo file makes them unnecessary.

All the solutions I've found seem dauntingly long and cumbersome for my prediciment.

I'm also curious if the elimination of a significant number of these keywords (and also my collections) might improve Lightroom's performance?

Stats: Keywords - 5,904  Images - 172,000

Thanks - Kevin

[dj_paige]

Metadata->Purge Unused Keywords gets rid of keywords that have been assigned to zero photos.

Other than that, I don't have a good idea on how to deal with the rest of them, other than manually.

I am skeptical that this is a drain on Lightroom Classic performance. What do you base this claim on? What aspects of Lightroom Classic performance do you think are being affected by this?

[Klozaw]

Thanks I've used the purge feature. It's those pesky keywords used but a once or twice I'd like to delete.

My suspicion reflects the gradual degradation of performance over the last couple versions.  For example, whenever the RAM use gets above 3 or 4 GB (I have 32 GBs of RAM on my i7 Windows 10 PC) LR hangs while it appears to gather information when I Ctrl click on a series of photos that I want to highlight then delete.

Even if it doesn't improve LR's efficiency I suspect it would improve mine should there be a way to cull the heard.

[dj_paige]

While I agree that culling your keywords is probably a good idea, I still don't see a link with the number of keywords. Its really not obvious how the number of keywords would affect most aspects on Lightroom Classic performance. Nevertheless, if you cull the keywords, let us know if performance improves. (Or try an experiment to see if that helps)

[johnrellis]

See the Data Explorer plugin. E.g.

[johnrellis]

I agree with dj_paige that it's unlikely the number of keywords is causing performance problems (I'm quite familiar with LR internals and how it uses database technology).