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Keyword blunder

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robmrphy

New Member
Joined
Dec 22, 2020
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5
Lightroom Version Number
Classic
Operating System
  1. macOS 11 Big Sur
Hi, Folks -- I have Lightroom Classic and have (so far) imported about 30,000 photos, stored in different media, taken over the last 10 years. At the time of each import, I entered keywords at least for the location and sometimes for people, types of buildings, animals, etc.

Somehow -- I can't figure out what happened -- I entered multiple key words for ALL the images in my catalog. So, for example, every single image now has Italy, Sicily, and Miami as keywords even though that is not what I originally entered.

Is there any efficient way to clean this up? For example, would it be possible for me to delete certain place names (e.g. Sicily) from the keywords of all photos in the catalog? Then if I wanted to add back Sicily to photos actually taken there I could select by the dates of my trip and add that keyword back in.

Thanks for any suggestions (including what I likely did wrong to get into this pickle).

Robert
 
I think at some point you selected lots of images thinking you only had one image selected and added the “Italy” keyword. This happened to me. You may have removed keywords in the same way. Can you determine how many images are affected? Depending upon your answer and how frequent you have catalog backups, this may be resolveable.

This will mean merging your master catalog with a good backup catalog


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I take it you don't have the location information correct so that you just simply delete the keywords that are duplicate in the metadata.
 
I think at some point you selected lots of images thinking you only had one image selected and added the “Italy” keyword. This happened to me. You may have removed keywords in the same way. Can you determine how many images are affected? Depending upon your answer and how frequent you have catalog backups, this may be resolveable.

This will mean merging your master catalog with a good backup catalog


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
It's around 30,000 images. I have a catalog backup from a few weeks ago which I think is "pre-blunder" and should hold almost all of the images.

I've identified the three keywords that I appear to have added to every image. If I could mass delete those keywords only, it would be pretty easy to go back and replace those words on the images to which they truly belong.
 
Find the LAST correct catalog backup.
Once you have identified that catalog with the correct keywords. Return to your master catalog and make a copy to set aside just in case something goes awry. Remove the “wrong” keywords for all ~30000 +. images from the master catalog. Some of the keywords should be correctly applied to some images but will get deleted in the purge. We are going to recover them from the by merging the backup catalog into the master catalog
Once you have cleaned out the master catalog, use the “Import from another catalog to import the backup catalog into the master catalog. Lightroom will detect the difference in keywords and apply “Italy etc.” to those images that had them before the “blunder”


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
Find the LAST correct catalog backup.
Once you have identified that catalog with the correct keywords. Return to your master catalog and make a copy to set aside just in case something goes awry. Remove the “wrong” keywords for all ~30000 +. images from the master catalog. Some of the keywords should be correctly applied to some images but will get deleted in the purge. We are going to recover them from the by merging the backup catalog into the master catalog
Once you have cleaned out the master catalog, use the “Import from another catalog to import the backup catalog into the master catalog. Lightroom will detect the difference in keywords and apply “Italy etc.” to those images that had them before the “blunder”


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
Thanks -- I'm part way there. I found the last correct catalog backup. I made it a month ago and have added 1000 images since, but all in the same location so it should be easy to select those and add the correct keywords back in.

How do I remove all the keywords from the master (latest) catalog? (That's probably a really basic question but I'm a beginner!)

Thanks again.
 
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