P: Ability to sync Lightroom Classic keywords with the Lightroom Ecosystem

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Keywords do not sync correctly: When added on the mobile app (iOS), they do not appear in LR classic and not in LR Web (I deleted the new LR CC immediately, this version does not make sense to me).
Same problem into the other direction: Keywords from LR classic do not appear on the mobile app. 
Attention: At this stage the whole keywording within the iOS app should not be used!

[prilbert]

Is there any hope for keyword sync ever being implemented?

[Jerry Syder]

Highly unlikely I'm afraid. 

[Antoine HLMN]

Forget about it, it’s a political decision, not technical. And unless they have a very good reason to do it, it won’t happen.

[Patrice Morel]

it's a shame, I don't really understand what they expect to gain  with that decision. This is THE feature that I miss the most.

[Lewis Craik]

I have given up. I am moving from a desktop at home/laptop for the road, to a laptop for everything. It is going to be compromised for both tasks, and more expensive, but at least I will be able to keyword on the road.

[Antoine HLMN]

Officially it's for technical reasons: in Classic, keywords are hierarchical, in cloud they are flat. But I let you judge if that's a real technical limitation or not. The other argument is: be happy with the limited cloud features classic has because it was not designed as such, if you want sync features, go with cloudy. Understand: the sync features of classic are kind a "goodie".

My personal take on this is the following: Adobe has understood the potential of cloud features linked to selling storage in addittion to a way broader market market (compared to enthusiast photographers): cell phone users and casual shooters. Maintaingin both versions of LR must also be expensive, so they have all to win to 'encourage' the migration to cloudy.

But you'll obviously never officially hear anything other than "Both version are equally important to Adobe and the dev teams are working on both versions." Up to us, users, to use our sceptical mind 😉

[Califdan2]

Apparently the LR product manager is "married" to this idea of only having minimal metadata sync capability between the two ecosystems and is oblivious to the customer base frustration, convoluted machinations, expense, and inconvenience people are going through because of this one synchronization failure point. 

Only hope seems to be if the LR Product Manager at Adobe leaves and a new person takes over who cares about what their customer base needs and want.    

[Max LTV]

When I change metadata fields in Lightroom Classic, some metadata update in Lightroom Cloud and some do not. For example, changing the Title or Caption fields in Classic does propagate to Cloud but changing some other fields does not. Or rather the changes propagate to the photo that's in Lightroom Cloud but Lightroom Could does not "see". 

For clarity, let's say in Classic I change photo title, caption, and keywords from black to "Frustration". Then I update metadata in file and sync, and look at the photo in Lightroom Cloud - Title and Caption metadata updated but keywords field is till blank. But when I save the file from Lightroom Could, all 3 fields are actually updated to "Frustration". So, frustratingly, lightroom could actually gets out of sync with the actual file it stores in the could. 

This is very inconvenient because editing metadata is easier to do in Lightroom Classic, but then all that work is lost because there seems to be no way to get the Could to be aware of some of the changes. 

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Keywords do not sync between Classic and the Cloud.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

This thread is being merged into an existing authoritative thread for better tracking and response. 

[Max LTV]

But there is syncing of keywords, it's just badly broken. Keywords sync to the files stored in Lightroom CC, but Lightroom CC stays unaware of them. That is just bad software design and poor user experience. 

Why can't this be fixed? The simplest way to address it would be for Lightroom CC to re-read keywords on file change just like it does on file import. It will still be infinitely better than the current mind-blowingly poor design decision. 

For what it's worth, I'm already at a point of NOT recommending Lightroom to anyone ever, but this is pushing me to migrate away myself. The team just keeps making one bad software design decision after another and when they are pointed out, the response is borderline offensive. 

[Antoine HLMN]

@max_l_g5zfjo4iqqgaf 

For what it's worth, I'm already at a point of NOT recommending Lightroom to anyone ever, but this is pushing me to migrate away myself. The team just keeps making one bad software design decision after another and when they are pointed out, the response is borderline offensive. 

Amen 🙏🏻
I could not phrase it better.

LR used to be the best DAM, and by far. But development decisions the last years are terrible and customer are treated as excrements. Bugs are too often referred as « feature requests » if not referred to as « by design ». The updates are either marginal or for the social side of LR.

I too stopped recommending LR, sadly. LR used to be the best in its class. It’s not and by far!

[Lewis Craik]

Same here. This and the poor handling of Fuji .raf files means that I am pointing people towards Capture One. It is a bit trickier for me to change with 14 years of images in Lightroom.

[prilbert]

So I already pay for an individual subscription to the entire Creative Cloud.  The only way Adobe can get more money from me would be if keywording worked well between the Lightroom versions - I would then move my entire massive photo collection into the cloud and happily pay for the needed cloud storage.  Maybe there’s just not enough of people in my situation.  

[Antoine HLMN]

That wouldn't be needed because of how the different versions of LR work together. In short:

1) Classic and cloudy

* No keywords sync (so are stacks, color labels, ...)

* Only smart previews synced from Classic to the cloud, but they do not take storage 🙂

* Only way to have full res images in the cloud is via mobile, ...

2) Full cloudy:

* Keyword sync

* Ability to have full res in the cloud

* Limitations of cloudy compared to classic

* To be verified, but not sure you can keep the folder/album structure on your local drive or even if you can choose the location. That's a big no for me for several reasons. First reliability, pictures were lost in the cloud with no backup (!) and having them locally is a must. Then not having the folder structure on a local hdd (and the edits) would be a major barrier to migrate to another solution. The biggest no go for me.

[Jao vdL]

>but not sure you can keep the folder/album structure on your local drive or even if you can choose the location.

You indeed cannot keep your preferred folder structure if you go full cloudy. It files local copies of your files in a single location using a simple dated folder structure. You can choose the location however but Lightroom Cloudy keeps the files organized in a strict structure in that single location. The important thing to realize is that this is not a strategy for backup but is only meant to provide quick access to your files and you won't have to download copies all the time in order to edit them. If you delete a file in the cloud, it will also immediately get deleted from this local storage!

[Antoine HLMN]

Thanks for the precision, @jao_van_de_lagemaat !

Loosing any grip on the folder and album structure is just a big no no for me. This is synonym of total lock in with little or no way out.

The sync process might be deleting a file right away, but a backup strategy can still be applied on that specific folder, being TimeMachine or any other bakcup system.

[Jao vdL]

Yeah if you backup that folder you still have a backup of any file that gets deleted. However, be aware that your edits won't get backed up in that case. It is just the source file that gets backed up.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Having a mobile app is great, but I need to sync keywords to and from Classic. After all, this is just software. Please add this feature to the next sprint to solve this limitation.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

It is hugely inconvenient that keywords don't synchronize between these two platforms. The extra work flow entailed to correct for this significantly reduces the usefulness of LR Mobile.

Please correct for this! 

[DanielB_17]

Concur with those who have stated that this is extremely disappointing. This makes using LR Cloud at an adjunct to LR Classic (which seems the most natural use case, but what do I know) even more limiting.

Is there a mechanism for moving information from the Cloud to Classic environment? What I mean is, if I want to mark a photo or set of photos in the Cloud and then use that knowledge once I'm in Classic... How can I do that? (Keywords, labels, comments all either don't work or have massive constraints). Right now I am using the photo Title as a stop-gap, which is obviously a horrible answer.

Really quite irritating.

[gobino]

Hi,

I spent some time to ensure that my images in Lightroom Classic get the necessary keywords so I can retrieve them easily afterwards when I need them.

I just started syncing my collections to Lightroom and all appear nicely, however, when checking an image the keywords are not visible. Additionally, when searching for a keyword I know I applied, I get 0 results.

Is this expected behavior? Or did I do something wrong with the syncing?

[Jim Wilde]

No, you did nothing wrong, and yes it is expected behaviour. Keywords (and location data, face tags, presets) do NOT sync between Classic and the Lightroom cloud.

It is possible to effect a one-way and one-time transfer of Keywords and Location Data, but that can only be done the first time you sync images from Classic to the cloud. The trick is:

1. Ensure that smart previews of the images that you are planning to sync have NOT been created in Classic. If they have, select all the images and in the Library module on the menu bar do Library>Previews>Discard Smart Previews.

2. When you have added the keywords to the images (and Location Data if you do geo-tagging), select all the images and do Metadata>Save Metadata to File (Cmd/Ctrl+S shortcut). 

3. Start syncing the images. Because Classic only uploads smart previews, and because no smart previews exist in the catalog, Classic needs to generate them for uploading. In the process of generating those smart previews, the metadata that you saved to the original files (including the keywords and location data) is read and attached to the smart previews. Thus when they arrive in the cloud, those keywords/location data will be incorporated into your cloud catalog and you will see them and can search on them. Note, however, that Lightroom  does not support hierarchical keyword structures, so any such keywords will be "flattened", i.e. you will see them in a single continuous list.

As I said, that's a one-way thing....any keywords or changes to keywords added in Lightroom will not sync back to Classic (they do, of course, sync across the cloud system to any other Lightroom app you may be using).

[gobino]

Hi Jim, thanks for clarifying.

I generally always create smart previews on importing image from my camera for quicker editing.

I assume that is not an issue and I can do step 1-3 once I've added my metadata?

As mentioned, I've already synced some collections. How can I add tags to them?

Do I stop the syncing, remove them from lightroom, follow your steps and sync again?

Or what should I do?

[Jim Wilde]

Do I stop the syncing, remove them from lightroom, follow your steps and sync again?

Or what should I do?

By @gobino

Yep, that's the only way if you want to only sync smart previews to the cloud so that they don't use up any of your cloud storage allowance. There are other ways but that involves importing originals into the cloud, which take up space.

When you discard the existing Smart Previews, I'm not sure if that's an immediate thing of if there's a delay before they are deleted....so best do a small trial run first.