rob211
Senior Member
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2014
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I haven't been able to find a lot of info on this, so please verify if I'm on the right track. (Note, BTW, when I use ">" below I'm using it like LR does to display a hierarchy, while the "|" is an actual character.)
When Lightroom saves hierarchical keywording to an image it writes a list of all the words in the hierarchy to the IPTC keywords field. It also writes the hierarchy to "Hierarchical Subject" in XMP-lr. So keywords "animal>mammal>fox" in our LR keyword list would, in say a jpg, be IPTC keywords: "animal, fox, mammal" and in Hierarchical Subject: "animal|mammal|fox."
When LR imports keywords, it will structure them in an existing hierarchy if the keywords match. So, if I already have "animal>mammal>fox", and I import a new jpg (or load its metadata) that already has keyword: "fox," it will show up as "animal>mammal>fox" in my keyword list, and per the rule above, once I save it, it will ADD the two keywords "animal, mammal" to the jpg, and add to the jpg the Hierarchical Subject: "animal|mammal|fox."
So, by adding non-hierarchical keywords to jpg outside LR, and then processing them in LR (reading metadata; writing metadata) I can essentially convert a keyword into a hierarchical keyword; in my example just "fox" becomes a mammalian animal named fox, and now the jpg has the IPTC keywords "animal, fox, mammal" too. That's nice.
But what if I didn't already have "animal>mammal>fox" in my LR hiearchy? Indeed, if I had none of those words? If I import jpg with "fox" I get just "fox" and I'd have to create the hierarchy in LR by adding "animal" and "mammal." When I'm outside LR, I wanna create the hierarchy, but if I just add the new hierarchy by attempting "plant, vegetable, radish" I don't get anything but those three keywords in LR singly, flat. And I don't have any other program that could write to the Hierarchical Subject field.
But I found that if, with the new jpg, that if I want LR to import a new hierarchy I can put "plant|vegetable|radish" in the IPTC Keywords field and then LR will create a ""plant>vegetable>radish" hierarchy. The "plant|vegetable|radish" terms stay in the jpg IPTC keywords but as soon as LR does a "save" to the metadata those get transformed to "plant, radish, vegetable" in the IPTC keywords, and now "plant|vegetable|radish" is in the XMP-lr Hierarchical Subject field, and all is well.
I like to verify that I'm not missing something here, because I don't wanna mess up a ton of existing hierarchies by importing metadata that has keywords in the IPTC keyword field with the pipe "|" character and with both new and existing hierarchies in the xmp and jpg files themselves.
Thanks,
Rob
When Lightroom saves hierarchical keywording to an image it writes a list of all the words in the hierarchy to the IPTC keywords field. It also writes the hierarchy to "Hierarchical Subject" in XMP-lr. So keywords "animal>mammal>fox" in our LR keyword list would, in say a jpg, be IPTC keywords: "animal, fox, mammal" and in Hierarchical Subject: "animal|mammal|fox."
When LR imports keywords, it will structure them in an existing hierarchy if the keywords match. So, if I already have "animal>mammal>fox", and I import a new jpg (or load its metadata) that already has keyword: "fox," it will show up as "animal>mammal>fox" in my keyword list, and per the rule above, once I save it, it will ADD the two keywords "animal, mammal" to the jpg, and add to the jpg the Hierarchical Subject: "animal|mammal|fox."
So, by adding non-hierarchical keywords to jpg outside LR, and then processing them in LR (reading metadata; writing metadata) I can essentially convert a keyword into a hierarchical keyword; in my example just "fox" becomes a mammalian animal named fox, and now the jpg has the IPTC keywords "animal, fox, mammal" too. That's nice.
But what if I didn't already have "animal>mammal>fox" in my LR hiearchy? Indeed, if I had none of those words? If I import jpg with "fox" I get just "fox" and I'd have to create the hierarchy in LR by adding "animal" and "mammal." When I'm outside LR, I wanna create the hierarchy, but if I just add the new hierarchy by attempting "plant, vegetable, radish" I don't get anything but those three keywords in LR singly, flat. And I don't have any other program that could write to the Hierarchical Subject field.
But I found that if, with the new jpg, that if I want LR to import a new hierarchy I can put "plant|vegetable|radish" in the IPTC Keywords field and then LR will create a ""plant>vegetable>radish" hierarchy. The "plant|vegetable|radish" terms stay in the jpg IPTC keywords but as soon as LR does a "save" to the metadata those get transformed to "plant, radish, vegetable" in the IPTC keywords, and now "plant|vegetable|radish" is in the XMP-lr Hierarchical Subject field, and all is well.
I like to verify that I'm not missing something here, because I don't wanna mess up a ton of existing hierarchies by importing metadata that has keywords in the IPTC keyword field with the pipe "|" character and with both new and existing hierarchies in the xmp and jpg files themselves.
Thanks,
Rob