lightroom classic keyword clean up

[ronbyram]

Over the years my keyword list as grown and grown, just like other users.  In my cleanup i discovered the tree structure for keywording example  Country/state/city/subjects.

I see you can export the keywords into a CSV format.

Is there a way to Export/ rearange and reimport the updates?

[john beardsworth]

I see you can export the keywords into a CSV format.

Is there a way to Export/ rearange and reimport the updates?

By @ronbyram

Not really. Yes, you can export the list and tidy it up in an external editor, Excel for example. And you can reimport the restructured keyword file too. The problem is making your photos use the new-structure keywords. That quickly gets messy, and there's quite a risk of removing the old keywords from photos without adding back the keyword from the new structure.

In general, do any keyword list restructuring in LrC itself.

[John R Ellis]

Building on John's reply, the Any Tag plugin lets you export keywords to a CSV, edit and rearrange them using Excel or Google Sheets, and then import the edited CSV file, preserving the assignments of keywords to photos. But I recommend going this route only for things like spelling correction and making batch edits to the keyword attributes (e.g. Include On Export).

And regardless of which methods you use, make sure you make a backup of your catalog first, and test the backup.