Keyword list for more "family" oriented catalogs..

[pgallett]

I've seen several posts here discussing the various ways to structure your keyword lists and suggestions on what those keyword lists should contain. However, I'm approaching Lightroom more from the angle an amateur trying to catalog family photos vs a professional photographer cataloging their work. I realize the same fundamentals apply, but I just wanted to see if anyone has a good keyword structure they'd like to share or advice on setting one up. Also, any opinions on the depth of the keywording per photo (place, person, event, etc).

In case you can't tell, I'm getting ready to plow through about 11,''' photos that need keywording, so I'd like to get off on the right foot.

I realize most of this is highly subjective, but I'm just curious what works for other folks.

Thanks

 

[erro]

I've gone through the process of tagging my 12.''' photos for peoples names... it took a while but I'm done, and now I can easily search for people.

1. Create a main "people" keyword category
2. Create the individual names of people under that main category
3. Enter peoples full names, and use _ instead of space, so that each keyword is actually one word

- People
- - John_Doe
- - Mark_Hamill
- - Paula_Jones
- - none

And so on. This makes it possible to see what photos you have already looked over for peoples names... since they will have the keyword "People". Any photo with e.g. "John_Doe" will automatically also get "People", etc... If a photo has no people in it, use the "none" keyword. This makes it easy to sort out all photos not yet tagged for people.. .just make a smart collection where "keywords" doesn't include "People".

Also, be sure to tag a photo for ALL the people in it... otherwise, how will you know what photos to go back to and complete?

Once the list of names gets too long, create subcategories and move the names to them. For example:

- People
- - My_family
- - - Robert
- - - Wife
- - - Son
- - - My_mom
- - - My_dad
- - Johns_family
- - - John_Doe
- - - Jane_Doe
- - - Jake_Doe
- - Paulas_family
- - - Paula_Jones
- - - Mr_Jones

Oh... and that with the _ instead of space... it comes in handy in smart collections, when you realize that LR's smart isn't so smart at all times. In smart collections, space is used to separate different keywords. So how do you do when a keyword contains several words separated by space...? Use _ so that the key"phrace" actually becomes a word.

giving the keyword "spring in sun valley" (without quotes) and searching for that in smart collections will give you all photos with spring AND in AND sun AND valley, unless you are carefull with your smart collection constructions. using spring_in_sun_valley will let you use that as one unique keyword

 

[pgallett]

Thanks for the advice.

What else do you use as your basic criteria? Looks like you got the "People" category nailed down. I'm having trouble deciding how far to take it (People, Place, Event, Activity, Setting, etc). I don't want to overdue it, but at the same time want to make the exercise efficient as possible.

 

[erro]

So far I've only really done "People".

I'm also filling in the Location-fields: Country, City, Location

In the future I'll start looking at adding more keywords in other categories, similar to the People-approach. I'm thinking along the lines of "the 5 W's":
- who
- what
- where
- when
- why

"Who" is already done (people). "Where" is already in the EXIF (date and time), "Ehere" is mostly done with the Location-fields. That leaves the "what" and "why" categories, and they are no easy ones... What is in the picture? What is the picture of? Why was the picture taken?

But then again: to each his own... only you can set up keywording that works for you. It seems that you - like me - is keywording for your own sake, not for some stock agency or similar. Then all that really matters is that it works for you.

But however I will keyword, I think I'll use my People-setup: have a main category, have possible subcategories, have som kind of "none" keywords. And make keywording in such a fashion that it's clear whether I've lookad at this photo regarding this keyword or not. Keywording for a specific "genre" should only be done once for each photo I think. One shouldn't have to go back and guess if one have already keyworded an image, decided that no keyword should be applied, or simply have forgotten to keyword that image.

 

[clee01l]

Keywords do not need Quotes or underscore separations. John Doe is a valid keyword and can be searched on the filter bar with {keyword} as a metadata column. In a smart collection, you need to use {contains all} with {John Doe}

In the 5Ws, you do not need a When since capture date is sufficient. You do need a Where and a What Inside What you can put sub categories of People {John Doe}, Nature {Orchard Spider} and Events {4th of July}. I have not seen a need for a "Why" that is not included in Event

In my hierarchy, I have under People, I have Family>People, Friends>People, Others>People. Apart from People and on the Same level, I have a Keyword-Named Individuals for entities like Fido, Lassie, Punkin (a spider) etc.

With this schema, I can uniquely identify and place any entity, sometimes more than once.

There are quite a few examples of LR keyword hierarchial schemas on the web many of them free. I think best to find one that offewrs the structure that you prefer and customise it for your needs in a plain text editor. I think it best to do this outside of Lightroom and Import the list once you have the important parts of the structure. You can add to it in LR, move whole parts of the tree around etc. aftger you have used it on a few images.

My Keyword structure in in a constant state of revision but only for minor tweaks.

At my highest level I jave Locale (Where) Genre(What), Taxon (which really should be a synonym for all animals and plants), A later addition is **Internal which is not included on export but provides some groupings that could probably be managed as a series of static collections.

 

[erro]

Correct, keywords doesn't need quotes or undescores. I only used qoutes to emphasise the keywords here. Underscores however can be useful. Say you have a keyword "John Doe" and another "John James Doe". Searching with filter bar or smart collection for "contains all" John Doe will give you photos with both persons. On the other hand, if you keyword them with John_Doe and John_James_Doe you have two separate keywords.

Keyword is actually a bit misleading. It's actually a keyphrase we use in Lightroom as it can contain several words. But the filter bar and smart collection has no knowledge of this and treats each word separately.

The 5 W's already have When included in EXIF as I wrote in my post