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I am in trouble as I accidently erased all my keywords

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Antonio Correia

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Joined
Nov 14, 2008
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175
Location
Setubal - Portugal
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
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Cloud Service
I accidently erased all my keywords. I even do not know how I did it. Of course I clicked the erase button thinking I was erasing a photo from a collection.
I have a back up a month old but meanwhile I have not backed-up everything.

When I realized I had erased the keywords I did some "un-dos" but no results whatsoever !

Any help please ? Thank you.
 
Last edited:
I'm afraid you just found out the hard way that you should make backups more frequently.
 
I "think" you can import from your month old backup catalog. I'm trying to recover keywords from a backup from last October for 12000 images that "lost" their keywords.
I'll report in more detail when & if I succeed. So, stay tuned. In the mean time, run your LR catalog backup to get a reference point and a fall back incase the process make the master catalog worse in stead of better. It may take me a day or two to work out the proper steps so, please be patient.
 
I "think" you can import from your month old backup catalog. I'm trying to recover keywords from last October for 12000 image that "lost" their keywords.
I'll report in more detail when & if I succeed. So, stay tuned. In the mean time, run your LR catalog backup to get a reference point and a fall back incase the process make the master catalog worse in stead of better. It may take me a day or two to work out the proper steps so, please be patient.

Now... I am not going to kill myself.
Some hope left.
Thank you Cletus ! :)

Does LR has a folder or file with the keywords ?
If one can import or export keywords, perhaps there is some where a file with them...
 
I am interested to see the reply from Cletus-

My idea might be to "Export as a Catalog" [Recents] all the images that have been imported and adjusted after the date of the last backup. Create a smart collection to achieve this,
Open the month old Backup Catalog, and then "Import from a Catalog" [Recents], to bring in the recent work.
This would, I hope, restore keywords as they existed at the date of the last backup.
 
No, that's your keyword sets, not your actual keywords. I just wondered: did you really deleted them all? Deleting all keywords isn't so easy to do by mistake. Or do you simply not see your keyword list in the right panel any longer? If that is the case, just right-click next to a title in the panel...
 
Now... I am not going to kill myself.
Some hope left.
Thank you Cletus ! :)

Does LR has a folder or file with the keywords ?
If one can import or export keywords, perhaps there is some where a file with them...
The LR catalog contains everything. There is a database table of Keywords and their hierarchical relationship. There is another table that relates keywords to one or more images.

You have a backup catalog that has the keywords that were in your keyword list AT THE TIME the Backup was made. It also list the images associated with the keywords. Any changes in this relationships between the time of the last back up and the time you 'erased' your keywords are lost and will need to be recreated.

When Adobe introduced LR6.2 or there about, it was a buggy disaster. I say that the update corrupted my catalog. Adobe say their code has never corrupted any user data. We disagree. Anyhow even reverting back to the last good code version, I still could not open my "corrupted" catalog. I had to export as a catalog all of my LR data. In doing so, I lost all of my Publish Services since LR does not export these. Only recently I discovered that over 12000 of my older images were missing keywords. I have backups that go back to 2013. I was able to find a backup catalog that contains my keyword associations. It was a LR5 catalog. The last one before I converted to LR6. It is this catalog that I am trying to merge with my current master.

Backups are important, perhaps the most important thing that an end user can do to protect your critical data. . Remember that you will have to recreate and/or reimport anything that happens between the last good backup and the point where your catalog is corrupted by the system to the hard drive fails. I back up my catalog at least weekly and everytime I exit LR. I backup my master image files using a system backup (TimeMachine) and two CrashPlan backups — one locally and one to the cloud. MY LR catalog backup files are also backed up to the cloud.
 
Can you explain exactly what happened?

AFAIK you'd have to select all the keywords in the Keyword List panel, then use a contextual menu to Delete... and then it would give you a warning. And if you delete keywords from an image, they still exist in the catalog.
 
Rob, I can't exactly explain what I have done.
But let me tell you more about this.
I was searching for a couple of photographs using the little arrow at the right of the keyword. A filter actually as you know.
Then I saw one photograph I clicked on it and erased.
As the photograph was still on the screen I looked at the keywords and they were all gone.
Perhaps this is not exactly how I have done it because I only realized the keywords were erased some more clicks ahead.
I made several un-dos but without any results.
I left the computer on during the night without closing LR. The sleep would be a good advice I was hoping...
This morning I made Catalogues of some main collections, closed LR without back-up and re-started with a back-up 1 month one. BUT this was done on the MacBook Pro !
Only after I have recovered the images I have then backed-up LR on the external drive.
I moved then the external drive back to the main Mac and re-started LR clicking on the back-up file. The one created when LR makes the back-up.
What a mess. Did I made myself understand ?
If not, please do not hesitate to ask.
Thank you for your interest !
i-RmwcdDJ.png
 
Some screen shots would be helpful.

If you select one image, its keywords show in a box under Keywording. Did you just lose the keywords for that one image? It works the same for a selection of images; the keywords for all would be shown in that box. You'd have to select the keywords in the box itself to erase them.

The Keyword List is different. It's a list with arrows next to keywords. To delete those you have to select them and use a contextual menu to delete them; that would delete them everywhere. That's a different panel than the Keywording box I referred to.

How many keywords did you have? on how many images?
 
Antonio,

Could you have typed something into the search box at the top of the Keywords section:
Lightroom_2016-04-21_16-17-53.jpg

If it doesn't match any keywords, the entire list will disappear. Clicking on the 'x' in the search box will show them again.
 
A little update on my keyword dilemma. I imported my backup catalog into my master catalog. Overnight, it failed with an error. The Backup catalog has "missing" images since I have mad quite a few deletions since last October. So, I converted the backup catalog to a new master catalog and then cleaned up the missing images. I then Imported the old master catalog into this new master catalog. I now have key works back associated with the 12000 images. However LR has made virtual copies and I still have about 15K images without keywords but there is a virtual copy that stacks with it that does have the right keywords. My catalog has now gone from !30K images to !60K images. I'm still investigating clean up options.
 
I accidently erased all my keywords. I even do not know how I did it. Of course I clicked the erase button thinking I was erasing a photo from a collection.
I have a back up a month old but meanwhile I have not backed-up everything.

When I realized I had erased the keywords I did some "un-dos" but no results whatsoever !

Any help please ? Thank you.

I would love to know how you did it so I don't do it. Only going back a month would not be too bad for me.
Yeah; LR is great until we upset it in some way and then it becomes the mother in law from hell. I can only guess that because I have a lovely X mother in law
 
Thank you guys for your replies and sorry I took so long to write down a few words about what happened.
At some point I was - still am - not sure how I did it or even if I have done it because they were all there later on.
I am sorry but I may have done some stupid thing that made me think that I had erased the keywords and I had not.

Anyway that made me panic. Now, I back up the program every week or so and use Time Machine.
I have noticed that when we make a back-up the files generated are huge and my drive would be quickly full.
What do I do then ?
i-rxGVP5H-L.jpg

One backup is from 2016-05-12 and the other is from 2016-05-19 a brand new one.
The large file is the lrcat. I go back to the first backup, 2016-05-13 - which I have unfold in the second picture - and I move all the files BUT the lrcat one to 2016-05-19.
I then erase 2016-05-13 (the oldest one).
However, I have to re-start LR clicking on the blue file in number 3 picture.
And it works fine.

And you what do you do to save space ?
 
And you what do you do to save space ?

I don't try. Instead, I buy a larger disk drive. These days, you can buy 1 TB of storage for a desktop system for US $50 - US $75, and 1 TB will hold thousands of RAW or JPG files.

Phil
 
Two opposite and acceptable solutions, Johan and Phil ! :)
I'm in favor of keeping as many catalog backups as my backup disk will hold. Recently (in April) ia had to use a catalog back up that was saved in October 2015 to recover keywords that managed to "get lost" when I was trying to recover my catalog that got damaged the LR6.x was released. Deleting last week's backup because you have this week's backup seems foolhardy.

Disk drives are reliable for about 3 years. I have some that are 8 years old and still have not failed. I tend to use these for things like catalog backups. If the backups will eventually get deleted, then I'm not terribly upset if the drive failed and I lost those backups. The catalog backups BTW are not included in my cloud backup scheme.
 
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